Upon deciding what to write about for this blog, I thought of nothing. What, really, have we done? Turns out... a lot. While we seemingly have moved through class at a nice pace with little homework, there has still been a lot of material covered. First: Tone exercises. Almost everyday I look forward to the quick-wit response to a tone like indifferent or facetious. Most of the time while Holmes is explaining, I come up with a sentence with the tone of the day and leave room for one noun. Ex. I do not care for _____ for it is of no interest to me. Boom. Indifferent. It doesn't really matter which noun is given to me, for I can adjust my sentence accordingly. While it doesn't always work, I have had some success.
We also have been doing a lot of AP work. This has helped me pay attention to distractors. I was unaware of how much I fell for their tricks until we did this. The one I usually can get rid of almost immediately is the opposite. The trippy distractors are when there is a partly true answer, to two right answers and one is vague. Those... are my weak spots. Writing questions has helped a little... but only to the point where I know I still need to work on paying attention.
For the past week (ish) we have been watching Death of a Salesman. I am really interested in diving deeper into the book because the movie was so perplexing. There are quite a few questions I have: Does Willy have a disorder? What is the role of Women? Why does Biff cause so much pain for Willy? What is the significance of the contrast between Biff and Happy?
All of the above I hope to see when I start annotations. Things I have seen, though, include many symbols and many ways to look through different lenses. This can include the marxist lense, which looks at the power and money of the situation. Specific characters they would look at: Charle, Ben and Willy.
No wonder you win so many tone word challenges... that is actually a rather ingenious strategy, and one I might have to emulate if I want to get my Jolly Rancher intake up. Personally I think the homework load is a bit understated in your post, as I find myself spending a good bit of time on blogs and annotations. But as far as day to day homework there is really none. I like how you mentioned "distractors" as it reminds me of my time studying for the ACT, where I learned about similar types of questions. It just goes to show how interrelated all these different standardized tests are. I don't believe we ever explicitly looked at Salesman with a Marxist lens, however, we did talk about the limits of economic opportunity and how Willy is belittled because he has little money, which is related to that lens.
ReplyDeleteI like the way you use the tone exercise to practice on your own. This is quite interesting, I think I will try it on my own next time. :) I really start to like the tone challenge, it's not only just a boring definition in my mind. After Ms. Holmes' vivid interpretation and the excellent examples that our classmates come up with, I feel like those words just get so solid in my head that I could not forget easily.
ReplyDeleteFinding the distractors in the AP questions is quite difficult for me. Those tricks get me every time, they're also my weak spots. I think more practices will help me improve on doing those... Good luck to you!!
This is a very good review in my opinion. You actually took a moment to look back at what we've done and even added some questions that you would like to think about. Just as a suggestion, maybe try comparing things like what we've done in class, or to something you've read on your own or read in another class. Nice work (:
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