Here the responses to course materials can be found.
Response to Course Material – December 8
Over these last couple weeks in class we have started reading and now close reading Ceremony. I have to say; when I first read it I was very confused and didn’t like it much. The time skipped around a lot during this book, and I wasn’t used to that so it made my reading of the book a lot less enjoyable. Once we started to close read and annotate it together in class I started to get a lot more out of Silko’s book; we started with the very first poem and I began to learn new things almost at once. One of the most important new things I have learned so far is about the deities in this American Indian culture, for the Laguna there are three: Corn-Mother, Sun-Father, and Thought-Woman. These keep being mentioned or alluded to in Ceremony, the “time web” of Thought-Woman’s creation is stuck in Tayo’s head and Betonie is pregnant with stories like Sun-Father. I’ve noticed a lot of colors in the book too, except they aren’t always connected with the same meanings they have in Western cultures, like at one point in the book, green is very bad, Rocky’s wounds are green, and it was the green around them that killed him. These are just a few examples that I’ve seen in Ceremony since we started to take a closer look at it, and with these insights I’ve begun to like the book a lot more.
Response to Course Material – November 18
Since last time we did a Response to Course Material, we have been doing some interesting things, we have read and discussed Death of a Salesman and have been reviewing the Eras of Literature, which has been fun. Listening to examples of Beowulf recited in Old English brings a smile to your face when you also get to see the man reciting it with his very serious face, it’s fun. I worked on the Renaissance and got to present the historical information that led up to the important themes in Renaissance Literature. We also saw the Romanticism presentation and how the romantics were mostly a reaction to the Neoclassicists of the Renaissance.
The reading and discussions of Death of a Salesman were mind stimulating, discussing how Biff was a Christ-figure who didn’t live up to his responsibilities, and how the title Death of a Salesman could be taken two different ways, literally, the death of a salesman could be Willy who actually died, but it can also be taken as the death of the salesman in Biff, because the salesman in Willy was transferred to Happy who said at the end of the play that he was going to prove that Willy Loman didn’t die in vain, so the dream that Willy had was passed on to Happy.
This part of class has been exciting in our discussions of what each character means and the Eras of Literature.
Response to Course Material – October 20
When we last wrote a Response to Course Material we had only just finished reading The American Dream by Edward Albee, since then we have started to learn the meanings behind the play. We read an article called “Allegory in the American Dream,” it was very helpful in bringing some meanings to life, like how Grandma is another American Dream as well as the Young Man, but Grandma is the old American Dream one with rural roots and comes from “pioneer stock,” but the Young Man who comes and replaces her is the new American Dream, one of materialism.
We have also been doing a close reading of the play too, so we have been noticing things that Albee has but in that seem significant. In our class we have talked about how Mrs. Barker is a faceless authority figure which can be seen when Mommy forgets that she has seen her earlier that day and when Daddy cannot remember her name even when she has just told him, which happens three times in a row. Also how childish Mommy and Daddy are, they keep saying very childish things in very childish manners, like “Daddy: You two will have to stop arguing. Mommy: I don’t argue with her” (Albee). The way Albee writes is fun and I agree with what he said when he told the interviewer that the point of a play is to teach something, he does that well in The American Dream.
Reading Death of a Salesman should be exciting since our first read will be watching the movie and then we will jump right into the close read.
Response to Course Material – October 6
Since our last Response to Course Material we have covered more topics, and have even started reading some of the literature for the course. We have worked on syntax as the last section of DIDLS, and have already finished The American Dream by Edward Albee. The syntax part of DIDLS is somewhat a review for me since I am in AP Latin and analyzing the syntax in Vergil’s poem is a huge part of what we do, so the covering of many of the syntax forms has been a slight review.
The reading of The American Dream on the other hand, has been a completely new. I had not read anything so strange while reading a play before, since most plays I have read have been Shakespeare. Albee’s characters at first confused me, their motives for the things they did were very strange and the way they spoke so immaturely caught me off guard at the beginning. As we continued to read I began to pick up meanings in the play, which have been put to good practice in our essay structure writing, something I very much needed. In our group for the essay structure practice, we decided that Albee used his play to criticize American society, he has Grandma call the Young Man the “American Dream” but this young man has been mutilated in what he can feel and is nothing more than a hollow but handsome shell. From this we decided that one of this play’s meanings is that the American dream is nothing but a hollow shell that is overall unsatisfying and it provides what you want but not what you need.
The essay structure practice has been a great help to me, I’ve needed to practice writing with topic sentences and making them flow together well, so this practice in writing only the introduction, including a thesis, and the topic sentences has been helping me a lot.
Response to Course Material - September 23
We started off the year with our learning how to read properly, not that we had been reading wrong before, but we began to close read and learn more from the same piece. This close reading has taught me to read through things a few times in order to get the full picture of what the piece is saying, first read through it to understand what the piece is about, then go back and read it again looking at the diction, or the imagery included in the piece. I’m reading to see if the author’s using elevated language or slang, or where the words are coming from if it is comparing someone to something else. So an example of this might be if an author uses the word “panting” instead of “breathing heavily” or he uses “slobbering” instead of “salivating” I could guess the author is comparing this character to a dog.
We also learned how to write effective theses and introductions, a skill I have been trying to perfect. I had learned how to write a thesis in AP World History, and they have been alright ever since, but this TAP, or Thesis Answers Prompt, approach helps to keep the goal in mind. The introductions I have never done well with, so this format is very helpful, now all I have to do is write three sentences: opener, background, and thesis. This style is great and helps by getting rid of the artsy ways of introductions I was never very good at. Also organizing my essay is clearer now with the idea that I need to write topic sentences (something I never really got the hang of) that could go with the thesis to create a paragraph, something fluent and that makes sense. These forms of writing will be a real help to me as we write more essays, and hopefully the essays will improve more with practice too.
The examination of poetry has been interesting. Learning one definition of poetry to be “If it takes longer to understand it than it did to read it,” makes a lot of sense because honestly, poetry gets pretty abstract sometimes. Looking at poetry like that of Emma Lazarus versus Langston Hughes gives a good example, with the different views of America they take and their explanations shows the differences between poetry and prose.
