AP Exam Essay Practice #1

Part bildungsroman and part allegory, The Poisonwood Bible follows the radical changes a vicious environment inflicts upon young Leah Price.  While the characters are certainly strong and well-developed, the alien jungle the Prices find themselves in is ultimately what drives the plot and theme of disillusionment.  The influence of this powerful setting is seen best through Leah Price.  Her evolution is cleanly broken down into a phase of sheltered idealism and one of bitter cynicism.

Prose and Open Essays

Once again, I'll be imposing a loose time limit on myself, for the sake of both exam practice and my sanity.  I'm aiming for forty minutes, but I'll spend as long as I need to finish the essay.  Pre-writes are on a separate piece of paper.  I'll post them if anyone really wants to see them, but they're mostly incoherent scribbles.  The passage and prompts can be found on the main course blog.

At Least Two Essays

Since time restraints have typically been the most difficult part of AP essays for me, I'm limiting myself to forty minutes per essay.  Otherwise, I'm liable to keep writing for far longer than is possible on the actual exam.  Besides that, I'm honestly not too keen on spending my entire weekend practicing essays.

Pre-writes are included in the forty minutes, although I will be doing them on a separate piece of paper to facilitate my rather haphazard pre-writing method.

Groupthink

Our Groupthink today in class was more helpful than I expected.  I thought I had a decent grasp on the poems already, but the group as a whole brought a lot of insightful thoughts to the table.  In particular, the discussion of "Eldorado" taught me a lot of things that I wouldn't have found otherwise (to be fair to Kris, "Epigram for Wallstreet", which he worked on, was easy enough to understand that there wasn't much room for his own analysis).

The gist of "Eldorado", is fairly easy to grasp.  However, in my individual reading I did not notice the subtleties to the poem.  For one, Poe uses the word "shadow" to shifts in each stanza.  In the first, it is used in the literal sense of a shadow.  In the second, it is used figuratively to represent the growing doubt in the knight's heart.  The third stanza's use becomes even more obscure, as the knight meets a pilgrim's shadow, symbolizing his death.  Finally, the final stanza makes reference to the Valley of the Shadow and Death when describing what it takes to reach Eldorado.

One other thing came up on the subject of Eldorado that I found amazing.  Apparently, Poe chose a poem structure that had stresses imitating the cadence of a horse's gallop.  In this way, he hoped to convey the sense of a journey through both the words and raw sound of the poem.  I enjoyed the poem before learning this, but now it's even more amazing.

Gridlock

Justin Thompson and I will be analyzing "Enigma" by Edgar Allan Poe.  Kris Green is analyzing "Epigram for Wall Street."  Gus Blundell and Jason Reinwald are working on "Eldorado."

"Eldorado" analysis is here.
"Epigram for Wall Street" analysis is here.

Since we were having difficulties understanding "Enigma" at all, we've decided to use the simpler TPCASTT grid.  Once we have a more solid understanding, we may revisit with the vendler grid.

Seventh Reading

Justin Thompson and I chose to read poems only by Edgar Allen Poe.  For one, I usually enjoy Poe's writing.  Additionally, we figured that by choosing three poems by the same poet, we would be able to analyze the differences in prose of each one.  The ones we chose differ in rhyming scheme, theme, or both.  Here's what we read:

"Epigram for Wall Street"

"Eldorado"

"Enigma"

I'll be honest, we didn't read all of them the full seven times, but we did read them out loud several times.  The order I have listed them is more or less in order of comprehension.  "Epigram for Wall Street" was short and straightforward.  There was, to my knowledge, very little room for interpretation.  "Eldorado" was also fairly straightforward, but there were also layers to understanding it (what does Eldorado represent to the main character?).  "Enigma" was extremely difficult to understand, to the point that I have only a very vague idea of what Poe was going for.  We'll make sure to pay more attention to "Enigma" when working more with the poems.

Responses to Lit Circles

100th post!  Well, actually this is post 101, but I still have Pride and Prejudice notes that I haven't published.

The Picture of Dorian Gray

1. D

2. B

3. A

4. D

5. A

6. C