What Else Will You Be Reading This Summer?

If you count up all the pages you have been assigned to read this summer, and then if you were to compare that number to the number of pages assigned to comparable courses in other programs, you would be pleasantly surprised.  (Or perhaps disappointed -- I don't know.)  My point is that I have tried to lessen the burden on you (while still giving you challenging and rewarding material to read).

I have two reasons for this.  The first, and most important, is that I wanted to leave time for you to read some things that you wanted to read.  Because that reading can be very valuable, too -- or even just entertaining, because reading for the sake of reading can be a beautiful thing.

Reason number two -- I think a lot of AP teachers assign more with other teachers in mind rather than students.  ("See what my students are reading.")  Although, as we all know, they aren't.

So, what else will you be reading?  I just finished Landscape Turned Red, all about the battle of Antietam during the American Civil War.  And I'm now working my way through Most Blessed of Patriarchs, a book about Founding Father Thomas Jefferson.  I also have Opening Day: The Story of Jackie Robinson's First Season to read -- I always try to read some baseball history over the summer.  It's not all non-fiction, though: I have to start on The Rule of Mirrors, a YA novel by my friend and former colleague Caragh O'Brien.  And then there's Dr. Zhivago, gifted to me by a student last year.  I don't know how many apges in all that is, but it's a lot -- but all of my choosing.  Oh, yes.  And I'll also be reading Embedding Formative Assessment, gifted to me in June by the Tolland Board of Ed.

So what else will you be reading?

Summer Reading Assignments!

            1)  We’ll continue with something that has worked pretty well over the last few years – a community blog.  As you start your summer reading (and I wouldn’t be surprised if some of you take a few days off after the close of this year), you’ll no doubt find yourself either with some questions or some trenchant observations.  What to do?

            Go to our class blog – hey, so far, so good!

            Post your comments.  Read and respond to what your classmates are saying.  (Bookmark this site.  We may be using it during the school year, as well.)

           

            I expect that EVERYONE will post AT LEAST ONCE for EACH ASSIGNED WORK – that’s if you want a “C” – but hopefully a lot more.  The deadline for posting will be 6 a. m., Wednesday, August 31^st.

[Note: if you have trouble posting comments, try going in through your school email.  “Blogspot” is a Google product.  The schoolmail is gmail.  (“The big boys want the playground all to themselves.”)]

            2)  You will have to read and annotate the Poem Packet.  See the blogpost just below for an example of what I mean.  The packet must be turned in no later than 3 p.m., Friday, September 2nd.  (If you neglected to/weren't able to/"I-lost-mine" the poem packet, try my school webpage.)

            3)  You’ll also have to write a 2-3 page essay – the traditional “Five-Paragraph” Essay for which you will have to use materials from The Return of the Native and Hedda Gabler.   

            This is going to get a little involved, so I think I'd better set up a separate blogpost for this.

            

The Essay will be due no later than 3 p. m., Friday, September 2^nd.   It may be turned in early at:        jmacarthur@tolland.k12.ct.us .

Writing the Essay

I'm looking for some very specific parameters here.  They are:
          1)  No more than three pages.
                 Times New Roman, 12 or 10.  1" margins on sides.  0.8" margin on top; 0.6" margin on bottom (or 1" all around is fine).
          2)  Six paragraphs.
                 A.  Introduction.
                     1.  The introduction should conclude with a strong, well-defined  which serves as the guidepost as to where you are headed in your analysis.  This should be contained in one sentence.
                     2.  This thesis must be underlined.  (This may seem like very basic stuff, and it is.  Show me that you can handle the basics, and then we can start to get somewhere.)
                     3.  Remember, I am not your audience.  Your audience is anonymous, yet somewhat literary.  They may need a quick brush up on who Hedda and Eustacia are, and where they come from, as well as where you will be taking this essay.
                 B.  The body of the essay, which will consist of four paragraphs.  Two will be devoted to Hedda, and two will be devoted to Eustacia.
                      1.  Keep it simple!  Don't try to do too much in a paragraph.  Start each paragraph with a topic sentence.  (Remember those?  Not enough people do, believe me.)  The paragraph that follows should illustrate/demonstrate/prove the contention/observation that you made about the character in your topic sentence.
                      2.  There should be a thread, emanating from your thesis, that runs through and ties together these four paragraphs.
                  C.  The conclusion.  Here's where you review (in brief) the arguments that you have made in the body of the paper.  Think of it like the summation for the jury at the end of the trial.  You're reinforcing the important points that you want them to remember.
                      1.  The biggest mistake that people make in the concluding paragraph -- NO NEW MATERIAL SHALL BE INTRODUCED IN THE CONCLUSION.
          3)  At the end of the paper, attach the outline that you used to organize your paper.  I cannot stress enough the importance of good organization to a successful essay, and that requires pre-writing.  Remember, an essay is like an iceberg.  The reader only sees the top fifth of it.  For every hour you spend writing the essay, you should spend four hours in thinking and planning.
          4)  If you want more advice on constructing a solid academic essay, there's a wealth of material over at my THS webpage.  [Note: It's entirely possible that this page will disappear over the summer.  If it does, let me know.]
          5)  Remember, use the Literary Present Tense when writing about events that transpire during the course of the works in question.

TOPICS!

[Note: A topic is not a thesis.  A topic is where you go to start looking for your thesis.]

1.  "A Woman Confined"

          Eustacia is confined by the Heath.  She'd love to get to Paris, or even back to Budmouth.  She's confined by the rural society that is so different from where she grew up.  Hedda is confined by her home, by Christiana (the city where she lives), and especially by the society in which she lives.

2.  "A Woman Out of Place"

           Generally readers do not like these characters.  (I happen to like both of them, but there you go.)  But take a look at how these women behave.  (And don't forget that Eustacia -- a good ten years or so younger than Hedda -- is more a girl than a woman.)  How might these women's personal qualities result in very different lives if they lived in more progressive times?  (Watch out with this one!  Don't leave the original works behind when you start hypothesizing.)

3.  "Torn Between Two Men"

           Both Eustacia and Hedda marry, for reasons that make sense to them at the time.  But things don't quite work out as they plan.  And then into the picture come suitors from the past.  How do these relationships effect the motivation and behavior of these two women?

Twenty Contemporary Poems

But largely, c’mon — you and I both know — real live American poetry is absent from our public schools.  The teaching of poetry languishes, and that region of youthful neurological terrain capable of being ignited and aria’d only by poetry is largely dark, unpopulated, and silent, like a classroom whose door is unopened, whose shades are drawn.

This is more than a shame, for poetry is our common treasure-house, and we need its aliveness, its respect for the subconscious, its willingness to entertain ambiguity; we need its plaintive truth-telling about the human condition and its imaginative exhibitions of linguistic freedom, which confront the general culture’s more grotesque manipulations.  We need the emotional training sessions poetry conducts us through.  We need its previews of coming attractions: heartbreak, survival, failure, endurance, understanding, more heartbreak.

The first part of the fix is very simple: the list of poems taught in our schools needs to be updated.  We must make a new and living catalogue accessible to teachers as well as students. The old chestnuts — “The Road Not Taken,” “I heard a fly buzz when I died,” “Do not go gentle into that good night” — great, worthy poems all — must be removed and replaced by poems that are not chestnuts.  This refreshing of canonical content and tone will vitalize teachers and students everywhere, and just may revive our sense of the currency and relevance of poetry.  Accomplish that, and we can renew the conversation, the teaching, everything. . .

If anthologies were structured to represent the way that most of us actually learn, they would begin in the present and “progress” into the past.  I read Lawrence Ferlinghetti before I read D. H. Lawrence before I read Thomas Wyatt.  Once the literate appetite is whetted, it will keep turning to new tastes.  A reader who first falls in love with Billy Collins or Mary Oliver is likely then to drift into an anthology that includes Emily Dickinson and Thomas Hardy. . .

In the spirit of boosterism, I have selected twenty works I believe worthy of inclusion in this curriculum — works I believe could empower us with a common vocabulary of stories, values, points of reference. The brief explications and justifications I offer below for nine of these poems are not meant to foreclose the interpretive possibilities that are part of a good poem’s life force. Rather, I hope they will point to areas worthy of cultivation in that mysterious inner space, the American mind.

~Tony Hoagland, Poet

Okay, Tony.  I accept your challenge.  The thing is, I don’t care for your list of poems, so I’ve chosen my own.  Class, here are twenty (plus one) poems to whet your appetites, and to entice you into the joys of poetry.

~ Jim MacArthur, Teacher

Click to enlarge.

Okay, here's what to do with the poetry packet.  Two things.

1. Interact with the poems as you read them.  Have a conversation with the poet.  (See an example to the right as I read two poems by Marie Howe -- two-time poet at the Sunken Garden Poetry Festival in Farmington.)  If you're not sure how to read a poem -- no seriously, it's different from other reading, go here.

The completed, annotated set of poems must be turned in no later than September 2, 2016.

2.   Leave a comment on the blog (below).  As you're reading, if you have a favorite poem (or even a passage from a poem -- that's fine) share it with your classmates.  Or if you're puzzled by something, ask what others have come up with.

(3.  If you need a copy of the Poem Packet, go to my THS webpage.)

By the way, I encourage all of you to drop by the Sunken Garden Poetry Festival this summer.  (If you're under eighteen, it's free!)  Juan Felipe Herrera, the current Poet Laureate of the United States, will be reading on August 7.  Other Poet Laureates who have read there include Ted Kooser, Robert Pinsky, Billy Collins, Philip Levine, and Natasha Trethewey.  (Natasha has been here twice -- once as a young unknown and then later in her first reading as Poet Laureate.)  Many of the poets in your packet are Sunken Garden alumni.  There's food and drink, live music, then a poetry reading -- all in a beautiful setting on a lovely summer evening.  One can hardly get more civilized that that.

How to Read a Poem

Seriously.  How to Read a Poem.

Step 1 – Giving it the once over.

The first thing to do is give the poem a slow, steady reading from beginning to end.  (You can stop a little bit to try to figure things out, but not too much.)  Read it out loud, if you can.  (If the poet has an accent, use an accent.)              All you want to do at this point is to get a general idea of “what the poem is about”.

Step 2 – Figuring it out.

Now that you have a general idea of where the poet is going, you can begin to unlock the diction and imagery of the poem.  This needs to be done slowly.  You may have to read the same phrase, line, or stanza a few times.  At this point, you’ll want to interact with the poem.  Underline.  Make notes.  Ask questions.  Talk back.  (It’s called “marginalia”.)             Once that stanza comes into focus, you may want to go back to an earlier stanza, unravel that one, then proceed again.  Slowly, more and more of the poem will come into focus.

Diction: how the words are strung together.  The diction of a poem tends to be a little more confusing than the diction of prose.  You have to figure out what goes where – what phrase refers to what noun, what that pronoun is modifying.  Work at it.              Sometimes words are used in unusual ways.  “Because their words had forked no lightning. . .” says Dylan Thomas.  Here “fork” is used as a verb.  (Try identifying exactly what part of speech a word is being used as.)  A road can fork.  Conceivably you could fork a pork chop from a platter.  Here it’s being used a little differently – in a new way particular to this poem.

Imagery: Natasha Trethewey says “let the image do the work”.              Dylan Thomas doesn’t explain what he means by “their words had forked no lightning”.  As far as he’s concerned, he already has – why beat a dead horse?  There’s no hidden meaning here: there’s no symbolism.  The image is one of sudden illumination, which in the context of the poem indicates blinding insight.

Remember Occum’s Razor.  This principle is “often incorrectly summarized as ‘the simplest explanation is more likely the correct one,” (according to Wikipedia), but for our purposes, that definition will do.  I find that very often students try to look too deeply into a poem.  When Dylan Thomas says “Father”, he’d not referring to God, or the Church, or the patriarchal society that he lives in.  He means his dad.  (His dad might be a godlike figure to him, but in the first context, he’s still Dad.)

Step 3 – Putting it all together.

Once you gone through it slowly, untangling the syntax and grasping the imagery, go back and give it a start-to-finish read.  Go slowly but steadily.  (Out loud is always a good idea.)  By now you should have a pretty good idea of what’s going on.

Step 4 – A close reading in class.

The first three steps have been done on your own.  Now we’ll bring it back to class and give it a “close reading”.  We’ll see how you’ve done so far on figuring it all out.  At this point you may get new information – on the poet, or the times, or the language – that may fill in some blanks or cause you to adjust your previous interpretation.

Step 5 – All together now.

After we’re done with it in class, and before it’s time to take the unit test or the timed essay, go over it one more time yourself, blending your reading with our in-class reading.  It will all be a lot clearer and you should have a good appreciation for what made the poem important enough to make our curriculum.

Hedda Gabler (by Henrik Ibsen)

The year: 1890; the country: Norway. Hedda Gabler returns from her honeymoon to a house and life she despises, with a husband for whom she has no respect. Into this unhappy home bring two men who would become her lover – one an upstanding judge, and the other a brilliant but dissolute man with a scandalous past.

 Just a word of warning about Hedda. You probably won’t like her, but she’s a fascinating literary creation. She’s more complicated than you think (if the responses of earlier classes are any indicator). The actress Kate Burton called Hedda “a female Hamlet.” I’m not sure I‘d go that far, but she’s more than just a “mean girl“. There are reasons for everything she does, (although sometimes they are dark even to her). Take the “bonnet incident”. You can take her at face value when she tells Judge Brack that she doesn’t know why she does things like that.

 But for a key to understanding Hedda look closely at the nature of her relationship with Lovborg — especially in the past. (Hint: they were never physically intimate.) What Hedda wanted from the relationship and what Lovborg wanted were too vastly different things. Another key is when Hedda talks about people staring at her legs (or ankles, in one translation), so she refuses to get off the train. She seems tough and in control, but in reality she's quite vulnerable.

 Oh -- and shouldn't this play be called Hedda Tesman?

You can read it online here, or here.  Or listen to it here.  Speak Polish?  Watch it here.  Or even in English, here.  (Is that cheating?  A little bit.  But it's a play; it's meant to be watched.  If you read and watched, that would be okay.)  It's free or cheap ($0.99) on Kindle.  But I'd say the best way is to get a copy (maybe from a used book store, if there are any of those still around -- so that you can write in it as you read!

[Note: not to be confused with Heddatron, a play where "Jane Gordon, a very depressed and very pregnant Michigan housewife, finds herself kidnapped by a clan of renegade sentient robots and whisked away to the jungles of South America where she is forced to perform the title role in a mechanical version of Hedda Gabler."]

The Return of the Native (by Thomas Hardy)

Imagine yourself being a lively, vibrant young person stuck with a bunch of hicks in an insular location where nothing ever happens. (It may not be that big a stretch.) What can you do to amuse yourself? What would you do to get out?
The Return of the Native is a traditional 19th century novel by one of the great English novelists, Thomas Hardy. You’ll find that it’s kind of slow-paced for our tastes. But stick with it. The characters are interesting, and the situations they find themselves in are compelling. Hardy liked to subject his characters to the vagaries of fate, and that is certainly in evidence in The Return of the Native.

Warning: this book starts off slow. Real slow. It's a loving description of Egdon Heath, the setting for this novel. (The chapter gives you some idea of what it feels like for Eustacia to have to live there.)

 Try to get through it. The heath is an important character in the novel. But, rest assured, the whole book is not like this. Once we start getting into characters, and especially plot, you'll like it. However, if -- and only if -- you would find yourself giving up on Hardy, (or starting to consider alternative paths), you have my permission to skip ahead. Try a paragraph or two, or to the end of the chapter if need be. But then start in again. Stick with it. You'll be glad you did.

 Looking into my crystal ball, I foresee that this will be the least popular of the summer reading books.  Well, tough.  I believe that a lot of AP teachers create their summer reading lists for their colleagues rather than their students ("See what my students are reading!").  I don't do that.  This is the most traditional of the summer reading books.  It's a good novel, historically important, and something you should be capable of at least bulling your way through, if not enjoying.

 For what it's worth, I read it first when I was a senior in high school, and I loved it.  (Holden Caulfield even likes Eustacia, and he hates everything!)

You can find the text online here.   Kindle has several editions, some for free, some for only 99 cents.  I'd still go with a good old-fashioned book.