AP Lang: February 2-10

Happy Super Bowl Sunday! I hope you’re all enjoying the weekend. If you’re planning to watch the Super Bowl tonight, I’d encourage you to pay extra attention to the commercials.  This week we’ll be focusing on commercials and the arguments they make.  Our mentor text for the week is a sample of a synthesis essay from Fortune magazine about the challenges Fox had selling ad space this year.  I’m hoping students will see that the synthesis format is used “in the wild” and is not solely used in school research papers.  On Friday, we will discuss the article and how the writer used different types of evidence to support his claim.   The timed writing practice this week is also about advertisements. Students will choose a day this week to do the timed practice in class.

Please encourage your students to think ahead about their plan for this week. I’m hoping that they will quickly settle into this new schedule and learn how to most efficiently schedule their own class time.  Writing conferences will take place Tuesday-Thursday.  Students have the schedule on Google Classroom and should be prepared to talk about last week’s work on their scheduled day.  Conferences were optional last week, but many students chose to conference with me about their midterm essays.  I was impressed by the quality of questions and comments they had about their own writing. I’m seeing some nice growth from all of them! If your student did not choose to conference about his or her midterm essays but has questions about the score, please encourage him to come speak to me before school Monday-Thursday or during AA.

The other major writing piece we will begin work on this week is the process piece for the semester.  Students have three choices: an analysis, an argument or a synthesis. This week I’m asking them to decide which piece they’ll be writing and begin brainstorming their ideas.  They have a lot of freedom of topic for this choice, but I hope each week’s mentor text will give them lots of ideas.  By next week, I’ll expect them to be able to show me some preliminary drafting of their essay--at least some outlining--during their notebook conferences.

Please let me know if you have any questions!  

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