AP Literature & composition 2016-2017
English Literature and Composition is designed to be a college/university level course, thus the “AP” designation on a transcript 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. As a culmination of the course, you will take the AP English Literature and Composition Exam given in May (required). 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 exam will be granted college credit at most colleges and universities throughout the United States.
The most important requirement for this course is that students READ every assignment — read it with care and on time. Students unused to literature courses will need to plan time in their schedule for more reading than most courses require. Poetry, though usually not long, is dense and complicated and should always be read at least twice. Novels in particular require planning, focus, and commitment.
Students will write several essays per week, at least one of which they will be required to edit and resubmit each Monday. Students will peer edit these essays and conference with the teacher about the second draft, working toward a portfolio of essays that shows improvements towards an enhanced understanding of the analyzed text. As the final AP test is looking for an insightful analysis of several challenging texts, students are required to read daily and extensively, to understand how a variety of literary terms are used effectively to convey a deeper, more obscure meaning, and to be able to write analytically and eloquently about these unique perceptions.
Although the semester grade reflects students who turn in work late or students with excessive absences, the very good news is that grades in the class are actually based on improvement and hard work. If a student does his or her best and works to capacity, then he or she will get an A in the class, even if the grades received on papers are not As. Grades for each semester do not reflect a straight percentage, but do reflect continued commitment on the student’s part to do the work to the best of his or her ability and to be in class. “Commitment” may include, but is not limited to: attention to self-knowledge and self-improvement in the study of literature; handing in work on time; being in class; helping other students in the class by working cooperatively to gain knowledge and to help others become better writers, etc. In other words, grading is an individualized process; the student is in competition with his or herself and no one else. The grade in the class is entirely predicated on the choices a student makes to do the best he or she can and not on an absolute standard of seeming excellence determined by a societal norm.
This class is not about grades, but about learning. I also want students to have the experience of college-level learning, something most high school students do not have available to them. College-level learning is not primarily about rigor — though that’s a part of college — but about responsibility and acceptance of one’s self as a more mature student, reading and thinking about and writing more mature texts. The difficulty of the texts is a stimulus for students to make their own decisions about published authors, about themselves as writers, about their colleagues as writers, about the deep and ongoing questions that relate to what it means to be a responding, acting human being both individually and as part of a society.
I intend the course to be stimulating and demanding, one in which a student will grow in relation to who he or she is, rather than in relation to established “standards” developed by state or federal mandates. True learning, I believe, comes from self-demand, rather than society’s expectations. School is the last stronghold in this regard, a place where experimentation occurs for its own sake, where ideas are generated to be considered and examined for their own sake and not because there is a bottom-line expectation of so many widgets made in a certain amount of time for a certain “production” quota. The student, in combination with his or her colleagues and me, will create the parameters of this course. Learning is an organic, interactive process; it is not predicated on my filling students with information, as though they were empty vessels. My students and I will learn together.