Question 3 Resources

It's definitely worthwhile, says the English teacher on the eve of an in-class essay in response to an unknown prompt, to look at these samples.
Question 3 sample essays from 2003 and 2004.
Scoring responses to the sample essays: 2003 (Q3 on p. 4) and 2004 (Q3 on p. 4).

Much Ado about Education: An Argument or Personal Essay in the Comment Box

We spent a good chunk of time discussing practical and philosophical issues surrounding education. We considered both institutional and personal points of view. We considered structures, purposes, and experiences. We considered the status quo and alternatives. Now have your say.

Education Essay (with directions in R.A.F.T. form)

Role: Be yourself, a senior at Gloucester High School who has experienced, observed, and thought about education.

Audience: Your AP peers, your AP teacher, and others on the World Wide Web. (You'll be posting your essay in the comment box below by pumpkin time Friday, April 15.)

Format: You have a choice, whichever option you pick I'm imagining something in the 500 to 1000 word zone.

* You could write an argumentative essay using support and reasoning from your experiences, observations and studies to support your position on some aspect of education. (See topics below.) (Some of you may recognize the description of an argument essay from the SAT.)

* Or, you could write a personal essay, using narrative and reflection, to embody and suggest insights into education.

Topic: You could write about anything within the broad realm of education, but here are some of the topics many have you have already done some rich thinking about.

* How does the structure of the school day -- number of classes, length of classes -- and of the school itself affect teaching and learning?
* Are students motivated by a desire to learn, explore, and practice in order to respond and create? Are students motivated by a desire to achieve measurable success in school in order to please parents and gain access to colleges and jobs in the future? In what way does one dove-tail with the other? In what way are the two motivations opposed?
* How is the industrial model -- on which the century-old modern high school is based -- suited or not suited to the sort of learning you value and/or think is necessary?
* What are some of the alternative models for education? What are the advantages and disadvantages? What educational models and experiences -- inside and outside learning institutions -- work for you, for others?
* How might your experiences of (institutional or non-institutional) education -- here at GHS or elsewhere -- differ from others' experiences?

Whatever you write about don't forget to organize your thoughts into a focused argument or a sustained narrative with reflection.

I look forward to reading your responses.

King Lear Quotation Activity for Acts 4 and 5

 Korol Lir (King Lear), directed by Kozintsev, translated by Pasternak, music by Shostakovich

Each student chose four quotations from acts four and five in class on Monday, April 4.
Complete the following and bring it to class on Wednesday, April 6.

(I've sharpened the directions a bit.)
For each of the four quotations...
1. Identify speaker, act, scene, lines (e.g. if you chose the first line of the play: Kent, 1.1.1) You might use this website to help you find the lines.
2. Describe the context: who is present? what is the situation? What might any of this have to do with the quotation?
3. What's happening with language and meaning in the quotation? Consider images (both literal and figurative) and themes. Also, consider other features of language, like diction and syntax, in relation to meaning. Consider the possibility of irony. Discuss the significance of all of this in relation to the quotation's meaning.
4. Make connections between the quotation and your other quotations. (And/or make other connections.) Connections might have to do with speaker, events, imagery, themes.
*5*. I've added this: why do you think someone has decided that the quotation is significant and/or memorable enough to be included in a list of quotations from King Lear?

King Lear Quotation Activity for Acts 1, 2, 3

Engraved by Richard Earlom, 1792 based on a painting by Johann Heinrich Füssli

*** *** *** *** ***

Each student chose four quotations in class on Monday, March 28.
Complete the following and bring it to class on Wednesday, March 30.

For each of the four quotations...
1. Identify speaker, act, scene, lines (e.g. if you chose the first line of the play: Kent, 1.1.1) You might use this website to help you find the lines.
2. Describe the context: who is present? what is the situation? What might any of this have to do with the quotation?
3. Identify images (both literal and figurative) and themes. Discuss the significance of the imagery, themes and (more generally) the quotation.
4. Make connections between the quotation and your other quotations. (And/or make other connections.) Connections might have to do with speaker, events, imagery, themes.

Going After Cacciato: Making Meaning (beginning with the end)

In class on Friday you spent five to ten minutes responding to these prompts: 1. explain your understanding of the end -- "The End of the Road to Paris," "The Observation Post," and "Going After Cacciato" & 2. explain how you got to that understanding.

Then we had rich conversations about your responses to the prompts...and more. (I enjoyed it and hope it wasn't so bad for you.)

Follow up on the class conversation with a blog post. Explore possibilities. Construct meaning. Ask questions. Follow up on what others have said and have written. What did you notice? What might it mean?

Post your comment(s) by class time on Monday, March 7. I look forward to reading your take.

Update: (1) *Going after Cacciato* (2) Independent Reading (Six Weeks Left until the End of Term Three)

Thank you. I've already begun enjoying your poetry anthologies.
Here's what's next.

Read Going after Cacciato (336 pages) by Tim O'Brien by Friday March 4.

Now that we've concluded our all-poetry-all-the-time immersion, we're ready to tackle some new prose fiction.

We spent the summer and first semester dealing primarily with bildungsromans, repeatedly asking questions about the nature of identity and the self (who am I?), about the development of self (how does a self come into being?), and about the relationship between self, choice, and environment (what has shaped me?).

From here to the end of the year we'll be concerned primarily with journeys: Going after Cacciato (a novel including real and imagined journeys during the Vietnam War in 1968), Slaughterhouse-Five (a novel including real and imagined journeys during World War II and after), As I Lay Dying (a tragic-farcical novel told from many perspectives about a poor southern family's journey to bury its matriarch) , and Heart of Darkness (a dark, impressionistic novel about a journey from Europe to Africa then up the Congo River).

While reading Going After Cacciato think about and take notes on...
Themes
The significance of journeys (with destinations, purposes, the need for courage, failure of will, hardships, obstacles, success, survival, failure)...
The relationship between war, memory, and imagination....
(What is the relationship between memory and imagination, between what we recall and what we make up? What role does the imagination play in making memory (and present reality) bearable? How true are our memories? How true are the stories we concoct? When does factual truth deviate from experienced truth?)
The relationship between control and its absence, between order and disorder...
Technique
Narrative perspective and voice, narrative threads (there are three major narrative threads in GAC), narrative pacing, direct and indirect characterization, parallel characters and foils, suggestive imagery, the use of realistic and grotesque depictions, and anything else you notice.

Here's the original review of Going After Cacciato from the New York Times (February 12, 1978).

*******

Continue reading books for your independent reading and research project.
You'll turn in evidence of the reading on or before April 1.
You're expected to read between 500 and 1000 pages or so by the end of the term. (If you're reading difficult experimental fiction you'll likely read closer to 500 pages and if you're reading popular children's fiction you'll be expected to hit 1000.)

The goal of this reading is to prepare for the paper you will write during the fourth quarter. The notetaking and writing you do about the reading you are doing during third quarter will help you a lot when you write the paper.

There are three different ways you could show evidence of your reading and thinking.

Option 1: Keep a quotation response journal. You should have a quotation and response for every twenty to thirty (20-30) pages or so. Your responses should often relate to the central question and/or thesis in your proposal.

Option 2: Keep a double-entry notebook. Take notes -- quotations, paraphrases, other information -- on the left side of your notes & on the right side write down your thoughts about the information on the left side. What you write on the right side should often relate to the central question and/or thesis in your proposal. You should have a page of notes for every twenty to thirty (20-30) pages or so of your reading.

Option 3: Write short essay responses (300-500 words or so). You should write an essay for every fifty to sixty (50-60) pages of so of reading.

When I talked to you about this in class today I foolishly quoted total numbers that were too low. Sorry. By April 1 you'll either have between 8 -- not 6 as I said in class -- and 20 page-long responses or 15 -- not 12 as I said in class -- and 50 quotation responses/double-entry notes.

Twenty-First Century Poems & More Ideas for Writing Your Own Poems

Some of you asked for help finding a twenty-first century poem. Others asked for (more) help writing your own poems. Here are some resources & ideas.

Poetry in the twenty-first century:

Go here for the UBUWeb. In the upper left hand corner of the page (below Samuel Beckett's head) you'll see a search box. Search for your theme. Not everything you'll find will be poetry. Not everything you'll find will be from the twenty-first century. But I found a lot of interesting things while looking for your themes. (Note: It took me a few minutes to notice that in order to get the "next 10" results of my search I had to scroll down a bit & look at the lower right corner of the page.)

Go here for issues of Poetry magazine from the last decade. Look for titles that sound promising. Not all the poems are available on the web.

Go here for issues of Jacket magazine from the last decade. (Jacket #10 was published in January of 2000. I know, I know, the new millennium didn't begin until 2001 but I'm trying to give you guys an extra year in which to find a poem that addresses your theme.)

Go here for issues of Octopus magazine. (The link will take you to issue #14 but in the right most margin you'll see links to the previous 13 issues too.)

Go here for electronic books published by Faux press. (You'll see the titles of dozens of e-books published in the last decade. Look for titles directly related to your theme or which seem to share associations with your theme.)

*****
Ideas for Writing your Own Poems:
* Write your own poem in response to one of the poems you've found.

Perhaps you've found a poem that you relate to; you might present the theme in a similar way but with your own style (slang, modern diction, modern syntax, archaic syntax), your own images (ones from your own lived reality or from the mediated virtual reality you're familiar with) and your own details.

Perhaps there's a poem that upsets you might write a response chastising the poet or the poem's speaker. Or, you might create an alternative to the vision of the theme presented in the upsetting poem.

Your response might attempt to use the same form as the original.
Or, like Harryette Mullen's "Dim Lady," it might use a different form.

You might take further inspiration from Mullen to rethink & rewrite a poem:
Mullen transforms the traditional natural images of beauty found in Shakespeare's poem into imagery derived from contemporary companies and products. Could you transform the imagery in a poem you've found in a similar way? Or in some other way?
Mr. Telles recently "translated" a sonnet into Gloucester dialect. Could you "translate" one of the poems you've found into another dialect or speech register?

You might confine yourself to using only the words (or forms of the words) found in a poem you've found.
Or, you might write a distorted-mirror poem in which you write a variant of every word in the original. So "Bright star! would I were steadfast as thou art" might be rendered as "Dim moon, I'm certain that you change like me".

Some poets take a line that they like (or that moves them, or that disturbs them, or that stirs them) and use it as a catalyst for their own writing, titling their new poem "Poem beginning with a line from X". Here are some examples: 1, 2, 3.

* Write your own poem by "Google sculpting". Google sculpting is the process of using search results to generate language material for a poem.
There are several ways to do this:
1. Go to Googlism.com. Search for you theme. (Here is a search for "birth".) Edit the results into a poem. You'll be able to generate interesting and surprising new relationships and juxtapositions that reveal aspects of the theme that appear in our online culture but not, perhaps, in most poetry about the them.
2. Conduct a search of your theme -- or to make it more interesting use word combinations related to your theme -- using your favorite web search tool. Collect the language -- words and phrases -- from text that appears under the links. Edit the results into a poem.