We have learned all about The American Dream by Edward Albee. We also learned different ways to critize literature. And we learned how to analyze a piece of poetry for the AP exam. Lastly, we learned about all of the literary movements. One more thing; we learned about allusions.
Analyzizng the piece of poetry really helped me out. I am not the best at poetry and I was really concerned about having to write a paper about it on the test. While it took us a whole class period to learn how to do it, I am ready to learn how to do it faster. It really made me feel more confident in my ability to analyze poetry.
When we learned about the literary movements, a lot of it was review. But because I only took American Literature, I didn't know anything about the Victorian time period. Learning about this really helped me. I know can use the literature movements I know, and the ones I didn't know before when categorizing literature.
When learning about the critical lenses, most of it wasn't review. I had already learned all about them last year in American Lit. One that really got me was post colonialism. It was a lot to learn. All of the terms really made it harder to get a grasp on, but I think it will help me out in the future.
Once we went over all of the allusions, I realized I didn't know as much as I though I did. If we hadn't spent class time to go over them, I wouldn't been able to recognize allusions later on in the class, but most importantly for the test. All of the allusions are really going to help me out when trying to analyze literature. Before we learned them, I wouldn't have known what allusions to look for.
The American Dream was an odd play. I was really lost and confused as to what was happeneing. Well more why, than what. I understood what was going on but all of it was so different, I wasn't ready for it. Once we started reading packets about the play, and how it was analyzed, things became so much more clear to me. The play made so much more sense and I understood why Edward Albee did what he did. What threw me the most was how Albee showed Grandma as the old american dream, and the Young Man as the new american dream. I am excited to learn more about the play because I still don't know how other characters fit into this play.
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ReplyDeleteI think you did a great job on touching so many of the topics we covered in class. I also liked how you thought about the implications of learning all that we have. One thing I would suggest for next time is to cut down on the repetition at the beginning of the sentences because it gets a little distracting. For example, the first paragraph was a bit too repetitious with the wording of "we learned". However, I think you did a good job by varying you sentence structures.
ReplyDeleteI think you did a good job of summarizing what we did in class, but that's not really the point of the "response to in-class materials" section. You're just supposed to pick out something really significant to you and respond to it. You touch on everything, but you sacrifice quality in your analysis of the material.
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