AP Literature and Composition

What are you thinking??

Carolyn Johnson

What AP Lit is not

• “English major” / think “college readiness”

• “extrinsic reward” / think “intrinsic reward”

• “difficulty” / think “rigor”

Adjust hearsay perceptions!

- +

College-ready skills: Reading

The pieces chosen for the AP Literature and Composition course invite and reward rereading, and do not, like ephemeral works in [more popular genres], yield all of their pleasures of thought and feeling the first time through.

CONTEXT: What surrounds the work?

CONTENT: What’s going on?

CONNECTION: Why is it important?

The College Board states the importance of reading deliberately and thoroughly . . .

College-ready skills: Reading

. . . she was the most beautiful person he had ever seen.

With stars in her eyes and veils in her hair, with cyclamen and wild violets – what nonsense was he thinking? She was fifty at least – she had eight children. Stepping through fields of flowers and taking to her breast buds that had broken and lambs that had fallen; with the stars in her eyes and the wind in her hair – He took her bag.

Virginia Woolf, To the Lighthouse

“And the sound of your heart," he continued. "It's the most significant sound in my world. I'm so attuned to it now, I swear I could pick it out from miles away. But neither of these things matter. This," he said, taking my face in his hands. "You. That's what I'm keeping.”- Stephenie Myer, Eclipse

• Point of View

• Sound •Imagery

College-ready skills: Writing

• effective use of rhetoric – including a controlling tone, consistent voice, and emphasis through parallelism and antithesis

• a wide vocabulary

• a variety of sentence structures

• logical organization

• a balance of generalization and specific illustrative detail

Reading and writing support one another.

. . . she was the most beautiful person he had ever seen.

With stars in her eyes and veils in her hair, with cyclamen and wild violets – what nonsense was he thinking? She was fifty at least – she had eight children. Stepping through fields of flowers and taking to her breast buds that had broken and lambs that had fallen; with the stars in her eyes and the wind in her hair – He took her bag.

Virginia Woolf, To the Lighthouse

The Exam Format

One Hour: 55 multiple choice questions

• 45% of the total score

Two Hours: 3 essay questions• 55% of the total score

Cost: $118 Ordering deadline: April

Section 1: Multiple Choice

• 4 -5 poetry or prose passages to read

• 10 -15 questions per passage test analytical skills

Section 2: Free Response, Questions 1 &2

• Two essays on given passages of poetry or prose.

Section 2: Free Response, Question 3

• One essay on a long work from a suggested list, or the student’s choice of a comparable work.

The Destination

(Or at least a 4)

Example: UC Berkeley AP Literature & Comp: Score of 4 earns 4 units toward breadth requirement (equivalent to English 1A); score of 5 earns 5.3 units toward breadth requirement (equivalent to English 1A -1B).

AP Language & Comp: Score of 4 or 5 earns 4 units toward breadth requirement (equivalent to English 1A).

Technology in Our English Classroom

Technology in the classroom

Notability app: For ease of annotating documents.

Technology in the classroom

• E-Book Reading

• Peer Editing

• Research

• Collaborative Thinking

• Presenting: Airplay (Keynote)