Course Response 6

Ceremony does a great job of confusing me. Maybe this novel is much too sophisticated, but I really don't get it.

Furthermore, since I already don't understand the novel as well as I should, annotating it is kind of a challenge. What am I supposed to be looking for? What is supposed to be sticking out to me but isn't? Where did all my insightful annotating skills for The American Dream and Death of a Salesman go off to?

Much of my difficulty annotating probably stems from the fact that this is the first entire novel I've annotated. Additionally, the prose that Silko throws into Ceremony contains a lot of Native American stories and archetypes that I as someone more familiar with Western stories am confused by. There's so much culture that I do not know about, inhibiting my ability to effectively understand the story as one cohesive plot line.

However, I definitely am enjoying learning about the Native American heritage that so heavily influences the story. Especially all the Native American archetypes, such as reciprocity and the color symbols that contrast with Western color symbols.

Course Response 4

Our recent class time has been filled with discussions about Death of a Salesman and working on our respective literary eras.

I really enjoyed our in class discussions about Death of a Salesman, much more than I did for The American Dream. Watching the movie as our first read through made things a lot clearer as we went through the book, especially during scene changes and flashbacks. I think I would have been a lot more confused about the context of the past and the role of the future without watching that movie.

My class had some extremely insightful discussions to say about this play, with the most memorable discussion being the one where we all sat in a circle in the middle of the room on the floor. We threw out some seemingly crazy theories that actually ended up making a lot of sense, like how Willie Loman represents prostitution. He sleeps with women to "get ahead", implying in a way that he essentially sells his body so that he can make sales. 

The other parts of class have been used for researching the Romantic era. To be honest, I had already learned a lot about this era from Dockus in American Literature. We covered Romanticism, and big names like Hawthorne and Melville were already in my repertoire of literature. I did have a lot of fun with this though, because Ms.Holmes introduced me to Prezi! I really like the layout of it and I plan on making many future presentations with this easy to use platform.

Course Response 3

Quite honestly, I feel as if first hour AP English puts me at a disadvantage because I'm essentially still asleep. I'm barely awake at 7:45 in the morning, and annotating Albee's American Dream is more of a struggle than an adventure at that obnoxious time in the morning.

Fortunately, the pace of the class is picking up now that we've finally molded our brains back to functioning for school. And it's helpful that my classmates are better morning people than I am.

They find things in Albee's play that I really haven't noticed, like subtle word play and different viewpoints. Sometimes we clash on interpretations of things; but this in no way means that the discussion environment is one of warfare and savagery. It's an extremely enlightening experience as we find interesting diction choices and laugh at all the sexual innuendos Albee inserts. Through our in depth discussions and annotations, we're finally applying all of the things we learned in the first few weeks of class rather than just going through formatted essays and looking for what has already been found for us.

Within our in class discussions, it seems that there's evidence indicating that Albee is a brilliant playwright who masterfully throws in all these subtle details. Everything from the beige and wheat hat incident to Daddy being so firm about opening the door has some sort of meaning or connotation to everyone in my class.

However, these details seem to take away from the widely accepted fact that Albee writes from the Theater of the Absurd. Maybe this is just me being weird, but I feel like there's a whole lot of contradiction. The point of absurdism is really to have no point, yet Albee already strays from that by seemingly trying to bash the American Dream. Furthermore, this play is  definitely not lacking substance; rather, it is teeming with it. Though some things truly seem redundant, like the scene where Grandma keeps saying things along the lines of "a man very much like daddy...a woman very much like yourself....a woman very much like mommy....", Albee has much momentum and drive in his writing.

I've definitely learned a lot, but I'm yearning to learn more about this play! If I have the time, (heavy stress on the IF), I would like to go through and annotate once more because I always absorb more information and also new insight the second time around for anything I read.

Course Response 2

Continuing on with the DIDLS explanation from the last course response, we went on to learn about syntax. Though we did a lot of in class exercises, I’m still struggling with trying to distinguish different types of syntax. It’s not clicking for me as fast as I would like it to. Unlike a lot of my peers, I’m not jumping at sentences and attacking papers syntactically. I guess it doesn’t come as easily as the diction, imagery, detail, and language aspect of DIDLS because it’s really not something that we’re exposed to in more basic English classes.

We’ve also been studying a lot about drama in the past few weeks. After reading the book chapter about drama, I felt like everything was pretty straightforward. Yes, I know what plot is. Yes, I know what a foil character is. And yes, I even can distinguish the different types of irony.

But then reading all the hand outs on the types of drama made me realize how vast the genre is. How changing one small thing can alter the entire course of where the drama goes. Though the different types of comedy are still processing in my brain, it’s definitely interesting to look at drama through a literary standpoint rather than from an audience perspective. It’s cool to see the different techniques come together rather nicely to gain a specific desired emotion from the audience.

What I’ve really taken away from the past few weeks has really revolved around Edward Albee’s Zoo Story. I think it’s a great text for a high school audience because it’s short, decently fast paced, and above all, has sexual jokes. Teenagers are immature. They laugh at words like poop. So of course, they’re going to love all these random sexual terms they’ve never heard of like “rub uglies” and “getting fresh” (Albee).  Though I really enjoyed the play, I found it hard to apply the concepts I read in the textbook to the play. 

Course Response 1

Truly, I feel like any English course ends up being a reprocessing of our thinking. We gain new perspectives, new writing skills, and overall new insight to put towards future papers and readings.

Even beginning with the summer homework, certain thought processes in my head were rewired. That Foster's assignment? Huge revolution! Certain subtleties in numerous works of pop culture suddenly came screaming obviousness in my head. I kept wondering how I could have missed so much!

When the actual class started, the first few days really were nothing too surprising. We sat through class learning that we probably would read a lot of books and write a lot of essays. No biggie. But then we were introduced to things such as DIDLS, and CLOSED READING....these words and acronyms immediately drifted into the category of "foreign territory." Just like how in foreign countries they speak a different language, I felt that everything Ms.Holmes said was Greek. I was not scared,  but I was definitely uncomfortable.  DIDLS? Wait what? How do I logically apply each aspect of that to a reading? Isn't diction and language essentially the same thing? And syntax? I'm actually supposed to care about how long a sentence is?

All these questions were running about in my half awake head. Slowly though, I got the hang of it. With my fellow peers, we conquered the David Sedaris essay the second time we went through it. Diction transformed from a misinterpreted group of words to how a specific word conveys a specific meaning and effect. We immediately picked up on his paragraph switches between informal and formal by noticing key words like "faggy (Sedaris)" juxtaposed in the same essay with more eloquent words like "convincingly (Sedaris)."

Then we went through poetry. I guess I've always despised poetry, but it definitely helped when the poem we observed was something we were all familiar with: racial injustice. Most of us were satisfied with saying that he's complaining about racism, but that wasn't enough for Ms.Holmes. It soon became so apparent how shallow that was, because that barely even touched the surface of how deep his poem was. The Langston Hughes poem was not just complaining about the injustices about racism, but rather, presenting a completely hopeless and disillusioned perspective towards the nation that ironically stands for justice. This profound underlying meaning impacted me much more than the seemingly generic racism argument had. It left me realizing how much I have left to learn, not just about poetry and poetic techniques but really how think about things more deeply than I have been.

But since we're only at the beginning of a long (hopefully) enriching journey, I feel that I'm going to be doing a lot of observation. This is especially true since I didn't take an English course last year and I'm a little rough on writing formal papers. Though I've already learned a lot for these first few weeks, my writing brain is still a hard lump of dry clay. So far I'm adding to that clay, but what I really need to do is get it wet and sculpt with it. Create something with it. Write long beautiful essays with it. And never let it get dry and inflexible again.