AP Lang: April 11-15

​Welcome back from spring break and welcome to crazy testing week! In case your student hasn’t shared this week’s schedule with you, here it is:

Monday:           Normal school day
Tuesday:           SAT testing + parent teacher conferences in the evening from 5-8pm
Wednesday:     ACT Work Keys testing in the morning; periods 1-3 following the test
Thursday:          Normal school day
Friday:               Half day; periods 4-6

And...just to keep things extra interesting, about half of our classes will be gone for HOSA or Robotics on Thursday and Friday!  

I want to assure you that we are still going to squeeze some important learning into this week. I know that their little brains will likely be completely spent by the time we hit Wednesday afternoon, though, so I will substantially lighten the load. There will not be any homework this week beyond some reading due next week.

On Monday, we’ll do two things: a little SAT review and some reflective writing to prepare for parent teacher conferences. For the SAT, we’ll look at the essay and talk through some of the sample prompts and high scoring responses. The SAT essay is very closely aligned to the rhetorical analysis essay we do in AP, so I hope this will lessen their stress for Tuesday. They are more than ready to write that essay!  Students will also look at their progress reports and do a little reflective writing about their goals for the remainder of the semester.  They will bring these home on Monday, and I’d like you to use these to have a conversation with your student about his or her progress prior to conferences. I think this will make our conversations more focused and productive, and it will hopefully help with my notoriously long line!!

On the half day, we’ll do some analysis of some children's books. This may seem a little silly, but it’s actually a nice, low stress way for students to practice their analytical writing in short bursts. It’s easy to recognize the strategies the authors are using, so students will be able to quickly zero in on explaining why those strategies are effective.

On Thursday, we’ll start our next unit which focuses on the extent to which science and technology impacts our lives. We will read several short texts aloud in class and practice our annotating and critical reading together. This will be excellent practice for students who are still struggling with the multiple choice tests.

I know this is not a fun week to be an eleventh grader, but hopefully we can all work together to get them through it!