Syllabus--5th Hr. AP English--2011-12
AP® English Literature and Composition
Mrs. Johnson
6th Hr.
Introduction to the AP English Literature and Composition Course
An AP English Literature and Composition course engages students in the careful reading and critical analysis of imaginative literature. Through the close reading of selected texts, students deepen their understanding of the ways writers use language to provide both meaning and pleasure for their readers. As they read, students consider a work’s structure, style and themes, as well as such smaller-scale elements as the use of figurative language, imagery, symbolism and tone.
Course Overview
The AP® English Literature and Composition course is first and foremost a laboratory setting where you will discover and create your own learning. Let me say this first and foremost, this class is not about “grades”. Many assignments of extreme value will not initially receive a traditional “Letter Grade” or “Point Value Assignment”. So, at this point, many of you are stressing and thinking, “But how will I know how I am doing in this class if you are not giving me grades?” and others will be thinking, “All right! No grades, well this should be an easy class.” You will, of course, receive grades for assignments at the point of completion; those grades will depend upon your individual degree of growth in learning, understanding, reading, and writing. You will not be graded one against another, but against yourself and your best efforts. The AP Course Grading Guidelines are given below in that section. A large part of this course is to work on bolstering your diligence and self-reliability, that is, meeting deadlines and remaining prepared for class. If these expectations are not consistently met, your grade will suffer accordingly.
The AP® English Literature and Composition course is designed to be a college/university level course; your transcript will reflect an “AP” designation rather than “H” (Honors) or “CP” (College Prep). This course will provide you with the intellectual challenges and workload consistent with a typical undergraduate university English Literature/Humanities course. At the end of this course, you will take the required AP English Literature and Composition Exam given in May. A grade of 4 or 5 on this exam is considered equivalent to a 3.3–4.0 for comparable courses at the college or university level. A student who earns a grade of 3 or above on the AP Exam will be granted college credit at most colleges and universities throughout the United States. If you score below a 3 on the exam, you will receive HS credit only for your course work.
This course is about arming you with the college level reading, writing, and thinking skills that you will need to succeed—not just in college level literature and composition classes, but in all college level coursework. To facilitate the learning of, and increased proficiency with these skills, we will closely read and analyze poetry, drama, short stories, propaganda, and novels. We will read—a lot, and we will write—a lot. As any of you who have experienced my classes before know, my mantra is: The more you read, the better you read, the more you write, the better you write, and vice versa.
Course Work
Together we will respond to pieces of text at not only the literal level, but also investigate and analyze the various and layered meanings of works, as well as, evaluate the author’s artistic technique and the structural implications of author choices. We will spend time developing our critical abilities, as well as, learning from and evaluating the skill and meaning offered to us by various literary critics. A large part of the course will center on the use of a Learning Journal and class discussion generated by this journal. We will also use a class discussion board to reflect upon key skill development and in sharing thoughts and analysis of various works.
We will be drafting, revising, and finalizing various essays in this course that will challenge and focus your abilities to write: statements, paragraphs, timed writing assignments, and formal essays including narrative, process, expository, and argumentative compositions. You will be assessed on submission and revision of these writing assignments—you will be assessed on your growth as a writer, not against the writing of others.
You will also have several creative writing opportunities including: poetry, short story, lyrics, and screen plays. As with the essays, your grade will depend upon submission and revision, as well as, your understanding and application of the form and format of each type of writing.
Your AP English Literature and Composition Exam is mandatory, will be taken in May, and will be factored retroactively into your final grade for the course.
TEXTBOOKS
Daiker, Donald, Andrew Kerek, Max Morenber, and Jeffery Sommers. The Writer's Option: Combining
to Composing. 5th ed. New York: Haper Collins: College Press, 1994. Print.
Hale, Constance. Sin and Syntax. 1st. ed. New York: Broadway Books, 1999. Print.
Lunsford, Andrea, John Ruszkiewicz, and Keith Walters. Everything’s an Argument. 5th ed. Boston:
Vendler, Helen. Poems, Poets, Poetry. 3rd. ed. Boston: Bedord, 2010. Print.
Works To Be Engaged
Though the works we will engage may change at any time, the following is a representative list of authors that may be examined—listed by genre:
Poetry
W. H. Auden; William Blake; Anne Bradstreet; Edward Kamau; Gwendolyn Brooks; Robert Browning; Lord Byron; Lorna Dee Cervantes; Geoffrey Chaucer; Samuel Taylor Coleridge; Billy Collins; Emily Dickinson; John Donne; Rita Dove; T. S. Eliot; Robert Frost; Joy Harjo; Seamus Heaney; George; Herbert; Langston Hughes; Ben Jonson; John Keats; Andrew Marvell; John Milton; Marianne Moore; Sylvia Plath; Edgar Allan Poe; Alexander Pope; Anne Sexton; William Shakespeare; Percy Bysshe Shelley; Leslie Marmon Silko; Wallace Stevens; Alfred, Lord Tennyson; Derek Walcott; Walt Whitman; William Wordsworth; William Butler Yeats
Drama
Aeschylus; Samuel Beckett; Anton Chekhov; David Mamet; Arthur Miller; Molière; Marsha Norman; Sean O’Casey; Eugene O’Neill; Suzan-Lori Parks; Harold Pinter; William Shakespeare; George Bernard Shaw; Sam Shepard; Sophocles; Luis Valdez; Oscar Wilde; Tennessee Williams
Fiction (Novel and Short Story)
Sherman Alexie; Isabel Allende; Jane Austen; James Baldwin; Saul Bellow; Charlotte Brontë; Emily Brontë; Raymond Carver; Willa Cather; John Cheever; Kate Chopin; Sandra Cisneros; Joseph Conrad;
Daniel Defoe; Anita Desai; Charles Dickens; Fyodor Dostoevsky; George Eliot; Ralph Ellison; William Faulkner; Henry Fielding; F. Scott Fitzgerald; E. M. Forster; Thomas Hardy; Nathaniel Hawthorne; Ernest
Hemingway; Zora Neale Hurston; Kazuo Ishiguro; Henry James; Ha Jin; James Joyce; Joy Kogawa; Jhumpa Lahiri; D. H. Lawrence; Gabriel García Márquez; Cormac McCarthy; Ian McEwan; Herman Melville; Toni Morrison; Bharati Mukherjee; Vladimir Nabokov; Flannery O’Connor; Orhan Pamuk; Marilynne Robinson; Jonathan Swift; Mark Twain; John Updike; Alice Walker; Evelyn Waugh; Eudora Welty; Edith Wharton; John Edgar Wideman; Virginia Woolf
Expository Prose
Joseph Addison; Matthew Arnold; James Baldwin; Jesús Colón; Joan Didion; Frederick Douglass; W. E. B. Du Bois; Ralph Waldo Emerson; Samuel Johnson; Mary McCarthy; John Stuart Mill; George Orwell; Michael Pollan; Gabrielle Rico; Richard Rodriguez; Lewis Thomas; Henry David Thoreau; Helen Vendler; E. B. White; James Wood; Virginia Woolf
Grading Policies
Course Work Percent of Final Grade
In-class writings, discussion, and activities 25 percent
Out-of-class writings and other assignments 25 percent
Reading Journal 30 percent
Course Citizenship (e.g., reading 20 percent
assigned material, attendance, commitment, growth)
Numerical Average Letter Grade
100 – 94 A
93-86 B
85 –75 C
74–65 D
Below 64 F
No work submitted 0
Course Calendar
The course calendar is our map to the year; the calendar is subject to change as we may find certain skills are easily mastered by the class or certain skills require a more attention. Course due dates will be updated daily on the class website.
| Week | Dates | # Days | Focus | Works | Assignments | ||
| Introduction to AP | 1 | 8/22 – 8/26 | 5 | Introduction to AP Reading Journals | Vladimir Nabokov: "How to Be a Good Reader" AP Pre-Test Writing Diagnostic | ||
| Introduction to AP--"Good Reading Skills" | 2 | 8/29 - 9/2 | 5 | Good Reading Skills | Nabokov | ||
| Poetry--Introduction | 3 | 9/6 - 9/9 | 4 | Poetry | Laurence Perrine: "The Nature of Proof" Vendler: Poems, Poets, Poetry | Handouts Reading Journal | |
| Poetry--Close Reading Skills | 4 | 9/12 - 9/16 | 5 | Poetry | Vendler: "Poems as Life" | P 6 - 95 Reading Journal | |
| Poetry--Middle Ages-Elizabethan-Victorian | 5 | 9/19 - 9/23 | 5 | Poetry | Anon, Chaucer, Dryden, Blake, Donne, Phillips, Shakespeare, Spenser | Reading Journal | |
| Poetry--Metaphysical-Romantics-Transcendentalits--Beat | 6 | 9/26 - 9/30 | 5 | Poetry | Blake, Wordsworth, Coleridge, Lord Byron, Shelley, Keats,Emerson, Bronson, Alcott, Thoreau, Fuller, Channing, Peabody, and Hawthorne | Reading Journal | |
| Poetry--Modern to Contemporay | 7 | 10/3 -10/7 | Poetry | Cisernos, Cullen, Cummings, Coleen, Bishop, Hughes, Eliot, O' Hara, Pound, Dumas, Dunbar, Hayden, Williams, Gisberg, Frost, Plath, Angelou, Whitman | Reading Journal | ||
| Poetry--Analysis of Literary Devices | 8 | 10/11 - 10 -14 | 4 | Compositon--Analysis | Comparative between two poems | Reading Journal | |
| Rhetorical Skills: Writer's Worksop | 9 | 10/17 - 10 /21 | 5 | Rhetorical Skills | Hale: Sin and Syntax Nouns-Conjunctions Review Voice & Rhythm | Exercises for Ch 1 -7 | |
| Writer's Workshop | 10 | 10/17 - 10 /21 | 5 | Rhetorical Skills | Daiker: The Writer's Option Ch 1 -4 Warm Ups to Appositives | Exercises for Ch 1 -4 | |
