AP Lit: Dubliners & Frankliners, Where We've Been, Where We're Going

Phew.

A very cool week and a very nutty week all at the same time.  Lots and lots of goings on of all different sorts.

We explored Dubliners via Literary 3x3s and crafting thesis statements.  We are doing much more deliberate work around thesis statements next week alongside our work with our Frankliners project that begins in earnest next week as well.  We will be balancing the analytical and the creative, the prose and the verse.

We've also given blogging an overhaul with revised expectations, a new rubric, and I think a much better all around experience for you folks.  To be clear: these changes are not because I'm disappointed in the work you've done on your blogs.  Quite to the contrary, I LOVE reading your work.  There have been several outstanding, highest of quality posts this fall already.  And there are more to come.

No, this change is to put emphasis on that quality and less on quantity.


Now, this week was paved with other good intentions of mine.  Let's try to rectify this now that we are at Friday.   Though I said in class, I never posted here, so now here it is:

This week Indie Book Projects are due.  (Thursday and Friday.)  As they come in, I'd love for people to share them.  It won't be a graded presentation, but a way to honor the thinking and creating and to also help us collectively experience the texts you are choosing.  

Also this week was a How to Read Lit Like a Prof Week.  We're a little behind in that regards, so we'll be doing two in a row here.  This week and next will both be How to Read Lit Like a Prof Weeks.   This week?  "Geography Matters." 

Next week?  "So Does Season."

For next class, and this is just stupid degrees of important, read Joyce's "The Dead", the last story in Dubliners.  We will see how well that one story functions as the end result of the others we have read, to see if the circuit holds true, to see if folk tales continue, to see if that one word (ssshhhh still a secret until end of the day on Friday)

AP Lit: Joyce & Dubliners

For this week, we are exploring James Joyce and his short story collection, Dubliners.

We are looking to Joyce's style to help us explore the relationship between setting, character and plot structure.

Key features of Joyce's style include:

Fusion of Fiction w Reality

• Real places, real buildings, even real people appear amongst the fiction

Epiphany

• awakening/understanding
• appeals to all 5 senses

Free Indirect Discourse 

• a particular style of stream of consciousness
• fluid movement between narrator and character

Manipulation of Language and Aesthetics

• experiments with word play, structure, linguistics, genre

We started our work with a close read of "Araby" together to have a collective experience with Joyce's style.  

The readings for night one were then, "Eveline" and "The Boarding House."  Sketchnote/annotate and literary 3x3 each of the short stories. 

Here's a glimpse into what we'll be doing with those 3x3s.  

The readings for night two, "Clay" and "A Mother."  Again, sketchnote/annotate and literary 3x3 each.  

We'll be looking for trends across the collections of stories in terms of character, setting, structure, and style as means to understanding and to applying to our own thinking.   But not yet, one step at a time. . .

AP Lit: The Ultimate Joycean Story & Test Prep

TEST PREP.  MULTIPLE CHOICE.  MARVELL.

We'll start the day with some test prep.  Rather than an on demand, however, it will be the first of our multiple choice.

I've shared with you the reading and the questions.  It's a poem by Andrew Marvell.   Refrain from reading it until class, if you can resist.  Want a print copy? Print one off when we get to class and it's all yours.  Whatever works for you.

I'll be sending the questions along in a Google form as well for you to respond -- it'll let us look at the data afterward.

JOYCEAN 3X3.

Next.  We'll be trying to figure the one word Joyce believed captured Dublin at the time of his writing.  We'll try to uncover this using our literary 3x3s.

Bust out all of your Dubliners decks.  Give yourself plenty of space to work.  Lay them out.

Then start remixing.  Shuffling.  Trading.  See what sorts of stories reveal themselves to you.  Develop an original 3x3 and quickly note the story you see revealed.  You might sketchnote it.  You might audio record it.  At any rate . . . capture that story.

Then, find a partner.  Combine your decks.  Repeat the process.  Create a story together.  Capture that story.

You now have three stories that have revealed themselves to you and your partner (1 from each of you solo, 1 collaboration.)

Revisit your decks together.  Identify trends.  Consider Joyce's stories.  Your original stories. See if you can narrow your own decks down to one three-word-line to capture all of the stories.  Use the words from your decks to create that three-word line.

As a class, lay out those three-word lines together.

Identify the trends.  Distill.  Narrow.  Just like the NCAA tourney.

What's the one word?  Check it against the stories.  Does it work?

Capture all of this work.  Document.  Put it up on your blogs.


ASSESSMENTS.

Blog: 3+ Posts
Req'd Post: In How to Read Lit, Read both "Geography Matters" & "Season."  Then, using your ingenuity & creative spirits, create a 3 to 5 image photo essay (a sequence of images unified by intention) of where you live that you believe reflects the ideas present in Foster's work.  Explain your thinking.
Due.  Friday.  March 27.   Last Blog Post of Q3.

Complete.  Frankliners.
Due.  Today.  March 23.

Submit. Q3 Indie Book Project Self Assessments.  Get them in ASAP so I can assess your work from the beginning of the Quarter!

Complete.  Revisions.  Blog Posts.
Due ASAP.  Quarter closes April 3.

Design.  Q4 Indie Book Projects.
Due Thursday & Friday Before April Vacation.  April16 & 17.

AP Lit: Eveline & Boarding House Literary 3x3s and Modest Proposal Workshop

Hey folks,

I'm presenting at SXSWEDU right now -- almost spot on accurate as I'll have just finished my presentation when you come to class.

Here's what you'll be doing with Ms. Boisselle.

Start with Literary 3x3s.  Use cards from the cabinet and create your decks for both Eveline and The Boarding House.

Line up a set of seven desks. Each of you gets a desk.

Start with "Eveline."  Lay out your 3x3 on your desk.


Circulate and read one another's 3x3s and use post-its to notice trends and outliers you are seeing across the 3x3s.  Use another table or desk to collect those post-its.

Then affinity map those post-it notes by arranging, organizing and displaying them in a way that reveal the patterns, structures, ideas happening in Joyce's text.

After you make one arrangement and discuss it, do a second arrangement in half as much time.

Repeat the process with "The Boarding House," but using only half as much time as you did before -- ratchet up the intensity and see what that may help you see.

Store your literary 3x3s with your other decks.

Then, Ms. Boisselle will run a writing workshop over your modest proposals.  Follow her lead.

HOMEWORK.

BLOG. 3+ Posts
Req'd Post. Read How to Read Lit like a Prof: . . . Or the Bible

Show how Foster's thinking applies to any two of the works you've read this year prior to Joyce; use whatever medium you prefer for this work.  Why two?  After reading Foster's chapter, you'll see that one connection has been made and we know that patterns emerge once we have three.

COMPOSE. Modest Proposal.

1st Submission.  Due Thursday, 3.12

READ & LITERARY 3x3.  Joyce's "Araby" and "Clay."

Due. Thursday, 3.12

AP Lit 3G: Frankliners Workshopping

Today was an early release day.

We chose to break into two smaller work groups: one for tuning, one for developing.

The conversations were fantastic.

HOMEWORK

Blog: 3+ Posts (next week, you get to take off for vacation! woot!)

Req'd Post: Analytical work.  By this week you will have read three chapters from "How to Read Lit" -- "Blind," "Geography," and "Season." Foster delivers a great deal of thinking across these three chapters and I believe strongly they apply to Joyce's stories.

Find three powerful ideas from Foster -- one from each chapter -- and then apply those thoughts as lenses for looking at Dubliners.  Explain how each applies and can illuminate understanding from Joyce's work.  (You might focus on multiple stories or only one or two -- that is up to you.  Having a strong sense of Foster's thinking is more important than having a strong sense of each of these stories.) 

You may write, record, film or otherwise capture your thinking, so long as it is clear and can stand on its own without tremendous interpretation on the part of your audience.  Lots of digital tools you can use for this AND it could just be a series of paragraphs as well.  Work to your strengths/interests.

Due: Fri, Feb 14

Read: How to Read Lit Like a Professor "And so Does Season"

Due: Fri, Feb 14 

Write: Working Draft of "Frankliners" story/poem

Due: Wednesday Workshop, Feb 13

Upcoming: Read Frankenstein

Due: Thursday/Friday following Feb break.

AP Lit 3G: Diving Deeper Into Joyce (and some test prep, too)

We opened our day with some much needed test prep in the form of a multiple choice item.

From there, Mr. Ryder ranted a little bit.  It was a thing.  It had nothing to do with you folks, but of course, we already knew this.  We missed out on Hamlet time as a result and that's too bad.  He feels rather unpleasant about that as he writes this.

Then we did some amazing deep diving into Joyce and uncovered epiphanies, manipulation of language & aesthetics and free indirect discourse.  We used your design kits and marked up copies of the stories -- big strokes, lots of messy thinking, doodles and highlights and brackets abounded!  Also, super glad you captured your thinking with your phones -- so important to document your processes.

And wow.  You folks did an exceptional job on this.  I was impressed by what we found, including such observations as:
* Free indirect discourse can be as short as a word
* Little epiphanies tend to surface early in a story and build to a larger understanding
* Joyce loved the sound of words and the sounds often reflected his themes and ideas

We had a few minutes at the end of class to start a short brainstorm for "Frankliners."

Important to note!  The major due dates calendar is WAY OFF right now.  I'm adjusting it on Monday evening.

HOMEWORK

Blog: 3+ Posts (next week, you get to take off for vacation! woot!)

Req'd Post: Analytical work.  By this week you will have read three chapters from "How to Read Lit" -- "Blind," "Geography," and "Season." Foster delivers a great deal of thinking across these three chapters and I believe strongly they apply to Joyce's stories.

Find three powerful ideas from Foster -- one from each chapter -- and then apply those thoughts as lenses for looking at Dubliners.  Explain how each applies and can illuminate understanding from Joyce's work.  (You might focus on multiple stories or only one or two -- that is up to you.  Having a strong sense of Foster's thinking is more important than having a strong sense of each of these stories.) 

You may write, record, film or otherwise capture your thinking, so long as it is clear and can stand on its own without tremendous interpretation on the part of your audience.  Lots of digital tools you can use for this AND it could just be a series of paragraphs as well.  Work to your strengths/interests.

Due: Fri, Feb 14

Read: How to Read Lit Like a Professor "And so Does Season"

Due: Fri, Feb 14 

Write: Working Draft of "Frankliners" story/poem

Due: Wednesday Workshop, Feb 13

Upcoming: Read Frankenstein

Due: Thursday/Friday following Feb break.

AP Lit: Literary 3x3s: James Joyce & Dubliners

Here's the work we've been doing with Literary 3x3s & Joyce's Dubliners.

We only read four of the stories:

• "Araby"
• "Eveline"
• "The Boarding House"
• "The Dead"

The selection was chosen because of common threads running across those particular texts, relative ease of reading and lack of background knowledge required to understand even the nuances, and because they represent something of a life arc, beginning with childhood in "Araby," late adolescence in "Eveline," early adulthood in "The Boarding House," and mature adulthood and old age in "The Dead."

After creating literary 3x3s for each of the stories, we put them on index cards to build Joyce decks.  (We used letters in the corners of each to indicate which cards belong to which story.)

We did a variety of activities with them including:

• Finding common threads across the four stories by "tapping" (a la Magic: The Gathering) related cards.
• Shuffling the deck, laying out nine cards, and trying to determine which story emerges from the deal.
• Swapping decks and trying to determine the original creators' intended 3x3s layouts.
• Partners dealing out nine cards each and finding common threads across two different decks.

We will be keeping these decks and coming back to them using other author's works as we try to identify common threads across the other literature we read this year.

Here are some pics of the work we've done.

AP Lit 2B/3B: Joycean 3x3s & Frankliners

We start with MUGS Apostrophes 3 Quiz.

And from there . . .

We pull out our 3x3 decks from Joyce's Dubliners stories.  (If you weren't here the other day, you need to finish building yours.)

We will experiment a bit with those decks as we try to uncover common threads and big thinking across the four stories.

Then we deep dive in Joyce's actual language, uncovering evidence of his style in across these four stories.

• Fusion of Fiction w Reality
• Real places, real buildings, even real people appear amongst the fiction
• Epiphany
• awakening/understanding
• appeals to all 5 senses
• Free Indirect Discourse 
• a particular style of stream of consciousness
• fluid movement between narrator and character
• Manipulation of Language and Aesthetics
• experiments with word play, structure, linguistics, genre

All of this in the service of writing brilliant "Frankliners" short stories and narrative poetry.

What am I talking about?  THIS!  

Frankliners Project!

HOMEWORK

Blog: 3+ Posts
Req'd Post: Create a visual 3x3 of the town (or county) where you live.  What does that place mean to you?  How can you capture your relationship with your town through pictures?  Consider taking or drawing/painting your own.  Give considerable thought to how you arrange them.

MUGS: Apostrophes 3 on NoRedInk.com
Quiz: Thursday/Friday Feb 6 & 7


Read & Annotate: How to Read Lit Like a Professor "Geography Matters . . ."
Post: Annotations on the blog

Heads Up: Frankenstein is next!  Will need to be read by Thursday AFTER Feb break.  Let me know if you need a hard copy.  Many, many, many places to get it free online including here.

AP Lit 2B/3B: Gallery Walk and Hamlet

Today, we'll start with a quick recalibrating -- this feels more like a start to a new quarter than last week did.

Let's climb on to NoRedInk.com for a couple of minutes, play with Apostrophes 3, explore the practice areas.  We can do this while transitioning into our next work.

We'll review effective feedback.  Take a look at all of these pictures from the way back machine when we were doling out feedback on our last round of projects.  Let's see if we can increase our rate of meaningful, effective feedback for these.

Then it is time for the gallery walk for the latest round of book projects.  Post-It Notes will abound.


From there, a few minutes with How to Read Lit Like a Professor and powerful takeaways worth putting up on the board.

We will end today with a Hamlet viewing, picking up where we left off just after "To be or not to be."

HOMEWORK

Blog: 3+ Posts
Req'd Post: Create a visual 3x3 of the town (or county) where you live.  What does that place mean to you?  How can you capture your relationship with your town through pictures?  Consider taking or drawing/painting your own.  Give considerable thought to how you arrange them.

MUGS: Apostrophes 3 on NoRedInk.com
Quiz: Thursday/Friday Feb 6 & 7

Read:  Read & and review Joyce's "The Dead" & all three other Joyce stories; be certain to 3x3 "The Dead"
Be Prepared: To work with all four 3x3s, Wed/Th/Fri

Read & Annotate: How to Read Lit Like a Professor "Geography Matters . . ."
Post: Annotations on the blog

Heads Up: Frankenstein is next!  Will need to be read by Thursday AFTER Feb break.  Let me know if you need a hard copy.  Many, many, many places to get it free online including here.