During the past few weeks, we have been mostly working on Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead, with some AP writing practice, and we just started Ceremony this week with an in-class group reading and cultural education session.
To be honest, I was not at all interested in reading R&G, and didn't really enjoy it at all. After a while I warmed up to it and was fascinated by the discussion of destiny in the play, but it really just isn't my type of literature. I did learn to appreciate the sense of humor that Stoppard possesses and the work obviously has literary merit, but it was quite a slow read for me.
The AP writing practice, the most recent on a passage from Shakespeare's Henry VII in which Cardinal Wolsey laments his dismissal from the king's court, has shown me how much more I still need to improve. My skills at analyzing literature quickly and developing a good argument that I can present in a good essay are really not the greatest, but I've known that it would be something for me that takes practice. Hopefully before the end of the year I'll be able to improve a lot.
Ceremony has been great so far. I read a lot this weekend, as I drove to and from Cleveland to visit my family and had about 8 hours in the car with nothing better to do (except maybe sleep). I can't wait to find out what happens at the end of the book, and I think I've done a pretty good job of understanding what has happened up until this point. I look forward to our class discussions on this book.
To be honest, I was not at all interested in reading R&G, and didn't really enjoy it at all. After a while I warmed up to it and was fascinated by the discussion of destiny in the play, but it really just isn't my type of literature. I did learn to appreciate the sense of humor that Stoppard possesses and the work obviously has literary merit, but it was quite a slow read for me.
The AP writing practice, the most recent on a passage from Shakespeare's Henry VII in which Cardinal Wolsey laments his dismissal from the king's court, has shown me how much more I still need to improve. My skills at analyzing literature quickly and developing a good argument that I can present in a good essay are really not the greatest, but I've known that it would be something for me that takes practice. Hopefully before the end of the year I'll be able to improve a lot.
Ceremony has been great so far. I read a lot this weekend, as I drove to and from Cleveland to visit my family and had about 8 hours in the car with nothing better to do (except maybe sleep). I can't wait to find out what happens at the end of the book, and I think I've done a pretty good job of understanding what has happened up until this point. I look forward to our class discussions on this book.
Chris, I didn't really like the play Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead, either. I was honestly just confused for most of the time we were reading it. It took quite a few articles and class discussions for me to get it right. I did think that it was cool how so much meaning could be packed into a somewhat short play. I definitely like the book Ceremony better. Even though it took so long to annotate, I really like the author's writing style, and I was amazed at how many symbols and little details she put into this book to create the meaning from this book as a whole. As for the essays, I need some work with them too. Especially now since the AP exam is only a few weeks away.
ReplyDeleteI think that you did a nice job on this post! I like how you didn't just state what we did in class, but you added some personal insight, too.
So far everyone has been saying how they didn't enjoy R&G and I totally agree, although it supposed to be funny I didn't find myself laughing that much, instead I was confused about the deeper meanings in the play. Like Mehar said it took a lot of class discussions before I started thinking about the play in the correct way. Moving on to Ceremony, I thought the plot of the play was interesting but having to go through and annotate definitely made me start to dislike the book, because I realized how much I missed on my first read. In the end I was impressed with the amount of literary techniques that Silko was able to fit into the novel. I thought reading the articles was interesting because it gave a lot of new insights, and it helped me understand a lot of the Native American Culture, in fact I think we should have read those before we started the book. Last is the idea of practice AP essays, I agree that analyzing the poem is difficult, but I think it's even harder to find enough evidence to get your point across.
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