Hello, classes! It was wonderful to see everyone again. It sounds like things are getting back to normal-ish for all of us. An observation stolen from a student: in 2020 "normal" was The Walking Dead. In 2021, "normal" is Mad Max. It made me laugh, and laughing seems like a wise thing to do, maybe the wisest thing to do these days. Check out this top tier TikTok satirist. Every time I visit the HEB, I look for Jedidiah, but still no sign. So, during our one day of class this week, we dipped our toes into our next poetry unit with "Poetry" by Marianne Moore. We also used this as an opportunity to begin to wrap our minds around Modernist Poetry, and how Modernism differs from Romanticism. There are many things that I like about about this poem, including the three discussion points I suggested in class today:
But my reason for choosing this as our post-winterpocalyse first poem of the unit because of the argument it presents. Marianne Moore seems to believe that life is important, and poetry can be helpful when it creates an accurate reflection of life as it is in all its complexity. Beauty mixed with ugliness. Reality. According to Moore, imaginary gardens of airbrushed reality that edit out the frogs are "trivial," and it's hard for me to disagree with her when I think of the half-true realities created through social media. It's especially interesting to read Moore's poem with an idea of the context in which she wrote it. Above is a slightly boring 10 minute video that gives a much more coherent idea of the Modernist movement in poetry than the one that I zipped through in class. Basically, I think of most of human artistic evolution as growth, gradual change and progression. But not here: the difference between Romantic literature and Modern literature is more like a schism, a fault line, or a trench. This fracturing came from the trauma and large scale global suffering of social unrest, the Great Depression, and, above all, World War I. The dissonance created by her line breaks (enjambment) mirrors the dissonance of Modern concert musicians like Arnold Schoenberg and Igor Stravinsky.
Wheeewww! End of January finals over, in the bag, behind us. CONGRATULATIONS TO US ALL!! And here we are, at the end of the first week of the second semester of the strangest, longest year. This will probably be a short post, but I wanted to give you general feedback and thoughts that I had while rating your essays for your final while they are still sort of fresh in our minds. We'll be revisiting all this when we hit Unit 9 and build on our Essay #3 skills. 1. You must respond to the prompt.This observation gets at the heart of why Essay #3 is the most challenging. Many of us used The Tempest as our literary work: so far, so good. But some of our arguments got hijacked by our other observations of the text, mostly notably the theme of revenge. Since the AP prompt asked you to craft an argument about cultural collision, this is a big problem. You could write the best essay in the world on revenge, your essay could win you the Nobel Prize in Literature, and you wouldn't meet the objective for this essay. Having thoughts about a piece of literature is good, certainly encouraged all around, but this essay is testing your ability to organize your thoughts in response to a certain question. You don't get to ask and answer the question here. It's not like memorizing the lines and then acting them out during the exam administration. It's more like improv. 2. The Ethical Problem of Putting Thoughts and Words into the Minds and Mouths of Phantom PeopleGuys, I think it's best to avoid sentences that begin with "Many people will argue that..." I know you learned all about the strength of concession in rhetoric back in AP Lang, and possibly also for the English 2 STAAR, but I'm going to push back against that here, for this essay. The effect of bringing in invisible people whose opinions you are filling in like imaginary puppets can be kind of gross. "Some people say this, but I SAY THIS." In debate class, sure, because you have an actual real opponent next to you. But in Essay 3, you are making up opponents (strawman anybody?) and it's eating away at the integrity of your own argument. In AP Lang terms, you are damaging your ethos, your authorial credibility. Consider the difference between these two sentences: Many people will argue that Caliban is evil, but I believe he is good. Caliban's relationship to Prospero mirrors the complexity of real life relationships between the colonized and the colonizer. See what I mean? Sentences that begin "Many people will argue..." usually end in both the phantom puppet "many people" and the author of the essay being wrong, because the texts that we analyze as literature are rarely so black and white. Your writing and your logical reasoning and your score on Essay #3 will improve dramatically if you treat complexity within a text for what it is and get rid of the people you invented to argue with. It's vastly preferable for YOU to be capable of seeing the complexity of the text with all its many sides. Just you. 3. Action Verbs are Your Best Friend (As Per Usual)I think of this as "the missed active verb opportunity." Let me show you what I'm talking about with two anonymous student examples: "The cultural conflict is religious in nature." "This conflict between staying true to their Chinese heritage and being American is a consistent conflict throughout the book." These two statements are not strong defensible arguments, but they are both so close. All they need is an action verb and a predicate, and then these students will actually be saying something. Consider these revisions: The cultural conflict forced Alonso to challenge his religious faith. This conflict between staying true to their Chinese heritage and being American created a rift between Waverly and her mother that drove Waverly's choice to compete." That's the ticket. Now we've got an argument that can go somewhere. All we needed were some action verbs.
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AuthorI'm a Houston high school teacher. Welcome to my adapted, socially-distanced, quarantined AP English Literature and Composition classroom. Archives
May 2021
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