AP Lang: March 14-18

Last week we started our politics unit and had some lively discussions about the current political candidates. We read a number of editorials and examined the ways writers use language to persuade effectively.  I think it’s really paying off in the students’ writing!!  I’m seeing some excellent experimentation with voice and style in the most recent essays, and I think students will continue to gain confidence with writing in an authentic, natural voice as we continue our study.

Monday we will have our graded discussion of “A Modest Proposal” and “On Seeing England for the First Time”.  This was postponed from last week due to scheduling.  Tuesday and Wednesday will be dedicated to rhetorical analysis of those pieces and practice for analytical writing, and then on Thursday we’ll do an in-class rhetorical analysis essay. On Friday, I’ll start writing conferences up again, and students will do some work with our latest vocabulary list.  Please ask your students to share their vocab words with you.  I’m pulling them directly from our readings this last week and hoping that students will begin to use them in their own writing. There are only ten!  My theory is that by reducing the number we study, students can truly learn the words and add them to their vocabularies. The words from their last list are starting to show up in their essays---I saw dissonance, archetypal, subjugate, and churlish just this afternoon!

For multiple choice and reading practice, please encourage your students to take advantage of all the online practice I’m sharing with them on Google Classroom. For the past two weekends, I have shared multiple choice sample passages and videos of me walking them through the annotations and explaining the answers to the questions. Students who are struggling with multiple choice would really benefit from this extra practice.

Have a great weekend!

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