Sunday, March 10, 2013

Course Response 3/10



So once again, the biggest thing we did was finish a play.  We finished Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead although I feel like we didn’t really spend a lot of time on it.  Maybe that was because we spent so much time on Hamlet.  Annotating for R&G was rather painful.  When we first started reading the play, I really liked it but annotating started to make me dislike it.  I just felt frustrated with Rosencrantz and Guildenstern because they never did anything and the play never went in any direction.  One of the things we did with this play was read and discuss articles comparing Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead with Hamlet.  I thought these articles were interesting because they provided different ways to see the relationship between the two plays.  One article focused on the importance of Hamlet and how Shakespeare is basically god controlling everything.  The other article tried to keep a neutral position and instead just focused on the changes that occurred between Hamlet and Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead.
We have now started Ceremony, which I am excited about because it is not a play.  Although it’s long, I’m excited to finally be able to read a novel.  I think this book will be interesting because of the different cultural traditions and perceptions in this book compared to the other things we have read in class.
Lately, we have also been trying to prepare more for the AP test, which is good because I still feel a little uncertain about the test.  We did this assignment with poems from Chapter 7 in our textbook.  This assignment was a little difficult for me because I am not that great at interpreting poems so having to answer all the questions about the poems was challenging.  Some of the poems were quite interesting, such as “The Flea” which compared love/sex to a flea.  It was definitely something I had not encountered before.  For most of the poems, I could pretty much understand what was going on in the poem, but I struggled with understanding the meaning.  I think maybe analyzing is something I just need to practice more in order to get better. 
We also did some essays in class.  I found these to be stressful because I couldn’t finish my essay in the 40 minute time limit.  In the close reading that we did, I wasn’t able to quite understand and analyze the passage so I had some struggles starting the essay.  Thankfully, Ms. Holmes explained it to us and I had a much easier time writing the essay.  I am worried because on the day of the AP Test, I will have to be able to analyze and write my essay all by myself in 40 minutes! Aaahhhh!

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