With just over 1,500 people voting in this survey on the AP Lit Facebook group, most teachers are heading back to work right about now. I was in the fortunate (HA) group who went back in July and am already a full week into my year with the Class of 2023.
While we all sit through countless hours of PD during preplanning, the looming questions center on day one. Will my room be ready? How can I create a positive first impression of the class? What specifically will we do on day one?
This June I served on the AP® Standard Setting Panel. I know that many of you have questions about the increased pass rate, and I know that I would have been firmly among the group of cynics myself if I had not been involved in the process. (Something about teaching the last two years has diminished my perpetual optimism.) I wanted to share my experience with everyone who has been curious.
This post written by Gina Kortuem in the fall of 2019 originally appeared on APLitHelp.com.
When I was a newer AP Lit teacher I attended a one-day AP training, as many teachers do. During one of my trainings a brilliant veteran AP teacher was going over a writing skill, then mentioned offhand that she had recently spent a whole rehash working on that skill.
After seeing our puzzled faces, she explained. A rehash was a name she gave for the instructional period after an on-demand writing activity, wherein the instructor and the students went over what worked, what didn’t, and what they could do to improve. She showed our class an example, and we were hooked.
Almost a decade later, I’m still rehashing after each timed writing. I wish I could remember my instructor’s name so I could thank her (and credit her!) for this valuable instructional method. But since she was kind enough to teach it to all of us, I thought I’d pay it forward and share the idea with you.
Thanks for Megan Neville and Sarah Soper for their thoughts on the open ended question this year. Here’s a link to the prompts and also Sarah’s list of titles she encountered while reading.
MN: First of all, these students clearly understood the concept of hierarchy–and perhaps teased out some of the nuances of complex social, familial, and/or economic structures in the texts they wrote about. Once students crossed the threshold of understanding what the prompt was looking for, effective structure was the most notable characteristic upper-half essays shared in common. They didn’t just meander; they followed a clear line of reasoning with intention and confidence. And on the note of confidence, I noticed after a while that most students who wrote primarily in active voice were much more convincing and compelling than most students who wrote primarily in passive voice. I realize we don’t necessarily score the students on their command of grammar, but this showed up enough that I find it worth noting.
SS: This year, perhaps more than years before, Q3 seemed quite accessible for students to score in the upper half, and I was pleased with how many excellent essays I read. For an essay to score in the upper half for a Q3 it’s essential that it has 2 things: (1) a claim about the prompt itself – this one was about a hierarchy – and (2) a connection to larger themes or ideas in the novel (the meaning of the work as a whole). Then, successful essays used small moments in the text to illustrate how the author showed both the hierarchy as well as how it connected to major themes.
The “upper-half” were those student writers who were able to demonstrate a nuanced understanding of the passage. Those writers easily earned the thesis point and began at a 3 in row B (evidence and commentary). Often, those essays also earned the sophistication point. These writers unpacked their thinking about what community means and how the author developed that idea. For example, there were a few writers who explained how the differing opinions were necessary for the community. Others recognized how and why opinions shifted and, in some cases, conformed. One unique writer even explained how the octopus’s behavior was not natural but rather a projection of the community itself.
Here’s the first of 3 posts from this year’s reading. I asked two readers for each question to answer a few questions and share their thoughts. Thanks to David Choate and Gina Kortuem for today’s post. You can read more about them following their reflections.
Susan and I have always tried to build connections with teachers to make everyone’s classroom better.
We are starting The Summer 6 in 6 Book Challenge because we want to push ourselves to read a new book each week this summer and we want to interact with great readers and teachers while we do it.
We are believers – we think that the right book, the right poem, the right idea, can make a teacher and their classroom.
Our weekly online discussions will take place on the Much Ado About Teaching Book Club group page. You don’t have to be an AP Lit teacher to join the group, you just have to be someone yearning for a community of like-minded readers.
Week 1: The Secret History by Donna Tartt
June 20-26
Under the influence of their charismatic classics professor, a group of clever, eccentric misfits at an elite New England college discover a way of thinking and living that is a world away from the humdrum existence of their contemporaries. But when they go beyond the boundaries of normal morality their lives are changed profoundly and forever, and they discover how hard it can be to truly live and how easy it is to kill.
With allusions to David Bowie and interplanetary travel, Life on Mars imagines a soundtrack for the universe to accompany the discoveries, failures, and oddities of human existence. In these brilliant new poems, Tracy K. Smith envisions a sci-fi future sucked clean of any real dangers, contemplates the dark matter that keeps people both close and distant, and revisits the kitschy concepts like “love” and “illness” now relegated to the Museum of Obsolescence. These poems reveal the realities of life lived here, on the ground, where a daughter is imprisoned in the basement by her own father, where celebrities and pop stars walk among us, and where the poet herself loses her father, one of the engineers who worked on the Hubble Space Telescope. With this remarkable third collection, Smith establishes herself among the best poets of her generation.
Week 3: Daisy Jones and the Six by Taylor Jenkins Reid
July 4 – 10
Everyone knows DAISY JONES & THE SIX, but nobody knows the reason behind their split at the absolute height of their popularity . . . until now.
Daisy is a girl coming of age in L.A. in the late sixties, sneaking into clubs on the Sunset Strip, sleeping with rock stars, and dreaming of singing at the Whisky a Go Go. The sex and drugs are thrilling, but it’s the rock ’n’ roll she loves most. By the time she’s twenty, her voice is getting noticed, and she has the kind of heedless beauty that makes people do crazy things.
Also getting noticed is The Six, a band led by the brooding Billy Dunne. On the eve of their first tour, his girlfriend Camila finds out she’s pregnant, and with the pressure of impending fatherhood and fame, Billy goes a little wild on the road.
Daisy and Billy cross paths when a producer realizes that the key to supercharged success is to put the two together. What happens next will become the stuff of legend.
The making of that legend is chronicled in this riveting and unforgettable novel, written as an oral history of one of the biggest bands of the seventies. Taylor Jenkins Reid is a talented writer who takes her work to a new level with Daisy Jones & The Six, brilliantly capturing a place and time in an utterly distinctive voice.
In the United States, teenagers can focus on one task for only 65 seconds at a time, and office workers average only three minutes. Like so many of us, Johann Hari was finding that constantly switching from device to device and tab to tab was a diminishing and depressing way to live. He tried all sorts of self-help solutions – even abandoning his phone for three months – but nothing seemed to work. So Hari went on an epic journey across the world to interview the leading experts on human attention – and he discovered that everything we think we know about this crisis is wrong.
We think our inability to focus is a personal failure to exert enough willpower over our devices. The truth is even more disturbing: Our focus has been stolen by powerful external forces that have left us uniquely vulnerable to corporations determined to raid our attention for profit. Hari found that there are 12 deep causes of this crisis, from the decline of mind-wandering to rising pollution, all of which have robbed some of our attention. In Stolen Focus, he introduces listeners to Silicon Valley dissidents who learned to hack human attention, and veterinarians who diagnose dogs with ADHD. He explores a favela in Rio de Janeiro where everyone lost their attention in a particularly surreal way, and an office in New Zealand that discovered a remarkable technique to restore workers’ productivity.
Crucially, Hari learned how we can reclaim our focus – as individuals, and as a society – if we are determined to fight for it. Stolen Focus will transform the debate about attention and finally show us how to get it back.
Week 5: On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous by Ocean Vuong
July 18 – 24
On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous is a letter from a son to a mother who cannot read. Written when the speaker, Little Dog, is in his late twenties, the letter unearths a family’s history that began before he was born — a history whose epicenter is rooted in Vietnam — and serves as a doorway into parts of his life his mother has never known, all of it leading to an unforgettable revelation. At once a witness to the fraught yet undeniable love between a single mother and her son, it is also a brutally honest exploration of race, class, and masculinity. Asking questions central to our American moment, immersed as we are in addiction, violence, and trauma, but undergirded by compassion and tenderness, On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous is as much about the power of telling one’s own story as it is about the obliterating silence of not being heard.
With stunning urgency and grace, Ocean Vuong writes of people caught between disparate worlds, and asks how we heal and rescue one another without forsaking who we are. The question of how to survive, and how to make of it a kind of joy, powers the most important debut novel of many years.
n the house of Helios, god of the sun and mightiest of the Titans, a daughter is born. But Circe is a strange child — not powerful, like her father, nor viciously alluring like her mother. Turning to the world of mortals for companionship, she discovers that she does possess power — the power of witchcraft, which can transform rivals into monsters and menace the gods themselves.
Threatened, Zeus banishes her to a deserted island, where she hones her occult craft, tames wild beasts and crosses paths with many of the most famous figures in all of mythology, including the Minotaur, Daedalus and his doomed son Icarus, the murderous Medea, and, of course, wily Odysseus.
But there is danger, too, for a woman who stands alone, and Circe unwittingly draws the wrath of both men and gods, ultimately finding herself pitted against one of the most terrifying and vengeful of the Olympians. To protect what she loves most, Circe must summon all her strength and choose, once and for all, whether she belongs with the gods she is born from, or the mortals she has come to love.
With unforgettably vivid characters, mesmerizing language, and page-turning suspense, Circe is a triumph of storytelling, an intoxicating epic of family rivalry, palace intrigue, love and loss, as well as a celebration of indomitable female strength in a man’s world.
This is a link to the AP Literature Professional Night which featured teachers (hooray for teachers being trusted to do professional development) sharing ideas about teaching poetry. The panel was made up of Melissa Smith the moderator, Adrian Nester, Adekine Davidson, and me (Susan Barber) sharing some out our favorite poems and lesson ideas. Here’s a link to tonight’s slide deck:
This post originally appeared on APLitHelp.com (#RIP).
Many of us in education have been talking about how disconnected our students seem in the 20-21 school year. Sadly, the overwhelming nature of external stressors has become system wide. Even our top students are feeling trauma start to take their motivation from them. But for years, as an on-level English teacher, a secondary ELA interventionist, and finally a literacy coach, I have been working with disengaged students almost exclusively. There are a ton of tricks I have up my sleeve that help reconnect learning passion for reading and writing and a way to deal with personal conflict, and one of them for the past 10 years has been book clubs.
I first understood the power of book clubs when I was taking a break from teaching for two years as I raised my newborn son. As the first in the generation of both my husband and I’s family to have a child, and the first of my friends, I felt alone a good portion of the time. A friend invited me to a once a month book club, and all of the sudden, I was hooked! I was talking books with actual adults, learning about the world through all of these little instruction manuals. I was reading tough, advanced stuff with intelligent people and, I believe to this day, it saved me from the loneliness of being a stay at home mom.
