Welcome to the Class of 2014

Welcome to the Class of 2014, born in 1996-97, among the last of the 20th Century Kids

Your ticket to a seat in AP English Language and Composition is the successful and timely completion of the following summer homework assignment:

                                               I.     Create a writer’s notebook.

                                             II.     Read three books; respond to 7 analytical prompts (BNW); 11 chapter summaries (AOtD); annotate text, and craft 5 essay responses (TS)

                                            III.     Contribute to the summer homework blog:  start four threads, comment on eight.

                                           IV.     Read; utilize Cornell Notes to create a minimum of 15 notations on  “Just One More Game: How Time-Wasting Video Games Escaped the Arcade, Jumped Into Our Pockets and Took Over Our Lives,” by Sam Anderson, NYT Magazine, 4/8/12

That’s it!  Your notebooks are due in to me during the week of August 20-24, and your blog participation is ongoing throughout summer.  If you plan to be out of town during the week of August 20, I will gladly accept your notebook early.  I will not accept notebooks after August 24; students who do not turn in the notebooks or post to the summer homework blog are transferred to College Prep Junior English during the week of August 27.  If, during the summer, you realize that you would prefer to be in College Prep English, simply send me an email and I will see to it that you are transferred.

If your summer homework does not demonstrate the appropriate level of thought, care, or effort for successful completion of an AP class, or if it is incomplete, I reserve the right to transfer you out of the AP class, depending on available seats.

Mathematical Reality in Times of State & Federal Budget Cuts:  160 kids are registered; approximately 120 kids will pick up homework packets; there is a maximum of 70 seats.  If completion rates are low (below 60), we will be forced to close one section of AP, in which case the maximum number of students will drop to 35.

Detailed Explanation of Assignments

  

Part I:  Create a Writer's Notebook

• The writer’s notebook is an important part of our year together; it is created during the summer.
• The requirements for the notebook are specific:

• Three subject, college ruled, spiral bound, and sturdy; buy a high quality notebook, as it must withstand a year of heavy use.  Don’t buy a gigantic one, since you’ll be carrying it to class every day next year, or I will be carrying it home in a big bag to read/grade.  Make sure the pages don’t fall out easily.  Make sure the wire spiral won’t smash flat.

• If decorating notebooks to personalize them makes you happy, please feel free to decorate your notebook.  It is not required; however, if you do decorate, I must insist that you avoid feathers and glitter.  What is required:  write your full name in bold letters using dark Sharpie on the outside back cover.  (I have never had 100% of incoming students follow this simple requirement.  Let’s go for 100% this year.)
• Please write in dark ink (blue or black), and write on both sides of the page.  Do not use an ink pen that “bleeds through.”  Sharpies, bad.  Ball point ink, good.
• ALL SUMMER HOMEWORK goes into Section 1.

Part II:  Read three books.  Write.

Huxley, Aldous. Brave New World. New York, NY: Harper & Row, 1998, ©1932.

Consistently listed as one of the top ten novels of the twentieth century, Brave New World is a science fiction classic; like most science fiction, it creates a world that challenges us to reconsider our own world anew.

“When Aldous Huxley wrote Brave New World in 1932, he lived in a world where there was no pervasive culture of advertising, no widespread use of antidepressants, not a hint of cloning, or a whisper of genetic manipulation. Somehow Aldous Huxley foresaw that the future of humanity would lie down the path of technology and media. His guesses proved to be chillingly accurate. What was the most outrageous science fiction in 1934 remains a compelling examination of issues that fill the pages of our news magazines…The questions of government control, media manipulation, and status remain unresolved. Do we have Alphas and Epsilons in our society? Have we found a drug like soma to help us avoid negative thinking? Have our governments figured out ways to keep us passive? Brave New World takes a bold, disturbing look at what it means to be human in a world gripped by technological change and the manipulation of the media. It is one of the most potent combinations of a good read and a disturbing, thought provoking statement that I know.” —Robert Berring, Professor of Law, UC Berkeley

Seven Prompts:  This dystopian classic should provide you with plenty to think and write about.  You will write seven critical responses of 500-750 words each.  And remember, these essays form the basis of my first impression of you as a thinker and a writer…so knock me out.

Prompt 1:  Writers often highlight the values of a culture or a society by using characters who are alienated from that culture or society because of gender, race, class or creed.  Choose a character from Brave New World who plays a significant role and show how that character’s alienation reveals the surrounding society’s assumptions and moral values.

Prompt 2:  An individual’s struggle toward understanding and awareness is the traditional subject for the novelist.  Apply this statement to Brave New World.  Organize the essay according to the following plan:   1.  Compare the hero as we see him in an early scene with the hero as we see him in a scene near the end of the novel.  2.  Describe the techniques the author uses to reveal the new understanding and awareness that the hero has achieved.

Prompt 3:  In many novels and plays, minor characters contribute significantly to the total work.  They often have particular functions, ie., as instruments in the plot, foils to the main character, or as commentators on the main action and theme.  In a well organized essay, consider how two minor characters function in Brave New World.

Prompt 4:  An effective literary work does not merely stop or cease; it concludes.  In the view of some critics,  work that does not provide the pleasure of significant closure has terminated with an artistic fault.  A satisfactory ending is not, however, always conclusive in every sense; significant closure may require the reader to abide with or adjust to ambiguity and uncertainty.  Discuss the ending of Brave New World.  Explain precisely how and why the ending appropriately or inappropriately concludes the work.

Prompt 5:  The conflict created when the will of an individual opposes the will of the majority is a recurring theme of many novels.  Select a character from Brave New World who is in opposition with society.  Analyze the conflict and discuss the moral and ethical implications for both the individual and the society. 

Prompt 6:  A critic has said that one important measure of a superior work of literature is its ability to produce in the reader a healthy confusion of pleasure and disquietude.  Discuss the “healthy confusion” encountered in Brave New World.  In your essay, explain the sources of the “pleasure and disquietude” experienced by the readers of the work.

Prompt 7:  Many novels seem to advocate changes in social or political attitudes and traditions.  Note the particular attitudes or traditions that Aldous Huxley apparently wishes to modify.  Then analyze the techniques the author uses to influence the reader’s views. 

An effective critical response generally has a few key features: a rigorous attention to the demands of the question, an interpretation of the work. and a convincing argument based on textual evidence for that interpretation.  Writers argue for their interpretation not so much to convince readers to adopt it, but rather to convince them that the idea is reasonable and based on imaginative, thoughtful analysis of the work. They must demonstrate to reader how they “read” the work, pointing out specific details and explaining what they think these details mean.  Apply the ideas of Huxley’s created world to the world as you know it today.

Here is what you must avoid:  plot summary.  Outraged commentary about Huxley or the world he has created.  Pop psychology.  Dear Diary type entries.  Fuzzy, unfocused thinking.  “Magical” thinking (whereby you just invent an interpretation without any reasonable support or textual evidence).

Postman, Neil.  Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business.  New York:  Penguin Books, 1985.

Academic Summary:  This book, published in 1985 (10 years before the internet browser was developed and widely available), surveys and analyzes the effects of television on various forms of public discourse: news, religion, political discussion and campaigning, and education. Postman notes that television’s contribution to educational philosophy is the idea that teaching and entertainment are inseparable — an idea he finds lethal to students’ ability to develop critical thinking. 

My goal for you:  when reading this book, I want you to slow down, and develop the patience it requires to read, absorb, and assimilate a new idea.  Postman writes very clearly; however, his ideas are dense.  You cannot whip through this book.  You are going to have to read slowly, stop, reflect, go back, re-read.  This kind of close, reflective reading is essential for success in AP Language and in college.

In your notebooks, I want you to write three sentences for each chapter (there are eleven) that encapsulate Postman’s main point for that chapter.   What is his thesis? What kind of evidence does he use to support his claim? In other words, you need to practice writing ACADEMIC SUMMARY.  Writing academic summary is a skill to develop and practice; focus on big ideas, main points, important cause and effect relationships.

Carr, Nicholas. The Shallows: What the Internet is Doing to our Brains. S.l: W W Norton & Co Inc, 2011.

You must read this text — actually, all texts that you hope to understand well — actively.  That is, you should sit up in a chair, and read with a pencil in your hand.  It should be quiet around you – read without music, television or talking people in the general vicinity.  Isolate yourself from distraction — that means you must also unplug yourself.  Turn off your phone and your MP3 player, and don’t sit down with your computer.

Learn to annotate intelligently.  Put away the highlighter, and read Mortimer Adler’s very helpful essay from 1941 entitled, “How to Mark a Book.”  It is easily found with a basic Google search; I have posted a link to the article our blog.  Read the article, and adopt its suggestions.  In September, I will look at your books to see how well you have adopted Adler’s methods, adapted them and made them your own.

In the notebook, please write 500-750 word responses to the following questions:

• In the context of the book as a whole, what is the function of the Prologue, “The Watchdog and the Thief,” and the Epilogue, “Human Elements”?  How do these short chapters frame Carr’s discussion?  What is the significance of their titles?  How effective are these chapters in setting up and wrapping up Carr’s major concerns in The Shallows?

• What is a digression?  Nicholas Carr has embedded four brief digressions in his text.  To what purpose?  How are these discussions “digressions”?  How do they connect what has come before to what is coming next?  What is Carr demonstrating or suggesting by structuring his text in this way?

• Michael Agger of Slate writes, “In his new book, The Shallows, Nicholas Carr has written a Silent Spring for the literary mind.”  Look into what this literary allusion means, and then respond to Carr’s Afterword, written just in May of this year.  Describe the cultural current Carr calls upon us to challenge, and offer your opinion.  Is this worthy of your attention?  Your concern?

• How does Huxley’s Brave New World prefigure The Shallows – or, thinking about this in another way, how does a world that emerges from “the shallows” as described by Carr lead to Huxley’s dystopian future?  Write a notebook response and draw as many connections as you can intelligently discuss.

• Finally, I would like to see a metacognitive reflection piece.  That is, I’d like you to write a 500 word reflections about what is happening to you as you read this book.  Metacognition means thinking about thinking, so I want you to become alert to your own reading and thinking process, and then react, reflecting upon Carr’s argument as personal experience.  Become your own mini thought experiment, and write about it as honestly, intelligently, analytically as you can.

I will write these essays in my own notebook, and we will use these responses as the basis of class discussion in the opening days of class.

Part III:  Blog

You will become a blogger this summer. Writing for a authentic audience who has expectations of you is excellent practice for writers and thinkers.  You must be clear; you must discuss things that merit discussion; you must make sense. If you cannot write clearly, no one will really be able to respond to you.  When you cannot make yourself understood,  you are effectively silenced, no longer a part of the ongoing conversation and exchange in the world of ideas.

“If thought corrupts language, then language can also corrupt thought.” 

— George Orwell

The basic groundrules:

1. You must email me first so that I can clear your participation on this semi-closed blog:  afletcher[at]busd.k12.ca.us.  Remember to use academic register, your best grammar, and good manners when emailing me.
2. You will need to create a Google account.  It’s easy and free.  I suggest that you create an email address that is simple and professional; standard on most college campuses and in corporate settings is your first initial, followed by your last name: You must sign each post with your real name.  I cannot grade or respond to crzysrferchick88, flatworlder3876 or any such moniker.
3. Absolutely, positively no flaming.  You may question one another, ask for clarification, admit that you don’t understand what somebody is talking about, add a point that you believe somebody has missed, but you must NOT attack people.  Challenge ideas, ask for clarity, but do not bash one another.  If I have to censor you for this, expect one warning; the second time, your access to the blog will be blocked and I’ll simply enter a zero for this part of the assignment.
4. Please do not waste our time or bandwidth with “Me too!” and “I agree with you!” responses.  Such posts are ANNOYING.  If you agree or disagree, EXPLAIN yourself.

Start Four Threads

You must start four threads — that is, you have to originate four conversations. When you start a thread, refer directly to what you are reading and the question you want to raise.  Because our book paginations will be different, cite the chapter and whether the passage you are looking at is at the beginning, middle or end of the chapter.  Give us enough information so we can orient ourselves and figure out what you are looking at.  Use your questions from Postman, or use a passage in Huxley; perhaps you will hear or read something that reminds you of what Orwell is talking about in his essay.  (Believe me, once you start paying attention, modern media provides you with plenty to critique and think about.  Furthermore, this is the summer before mid-term elections; the sound bites will be flying, offering you an excellent “soundlab” from which to test Postman’s ideas.)  After you have written your thread, but before you post, write a terse, descriptive subject line.

These conversation starters should be at minimum 150 words long.  Anything shorter will not be effective.  For example, these two paragraphs explaining that you must start four threads are 199 words long.

Respond to Eight Threads

You must respond to someone else’s conversation at least eight times.  You may also respond to a response.  I expect some threads will become quite lengthy.  Your responses should also be complete thoughts, fully explained.  I don’t want to get all nit-picky on word counts; just don’t go overboard (rambling is never a good idea), and make sure you say enough to make a point.

I’d like to see you involved over a course of several weeks; all twelve responses posted in one week subverts the spirit of open discussion, so will receive half credit – the grade earned x 50%.  Be sure to review the penalties for late starts, and know that anything posted after midnight on Friday, August 17 will not be considered for summer homework credit.  Take some well deserved time off, but then get into it, and use all the time we have. We have 10 weeks; don’t jam the work into one week. Good writing comes from a thoughtful place; poor writing is almost always superficial.

Let’s see a lively exchange of ideas!  If you are confused, go to your classmates for help.  If you see something on television or in the newspaper that relates to what we are working on, share it.  And watch for my posts — when I see something that I want to share with you, I go to the blog with it.

You can read the blog here http://apblogger2012-13.blogspot.com, but you won’t be able to post.  The only way to post is to email me first so that I can add you to the list of participants.  This is a “semi-closed” blog; anyone can read it, but only invited guests can post to it.

PartIV:  Cornell Notes

Utilize Cornell Notes to work through this article by Sam Anderson:  "Just One More Game...How Time Wasting Video Games Escaped the Arcade, Jumped Into our Pockets and Took Over Our Lives," NYTimes Magazine, April 8, 2012.

To set up a few pages of Cornell Notes, follow these instructions:

Ø     Divide the page vertically: one-third of the space to the left of the line, and two-thirds of the space to the right.  We now refer to these columns as “Right Side” and “Left Side.”

Ø     Right Side:  This is where the details of the article go, arranged sequentially.   As you read, jot down main ideas and details here on the right.  Can be arranged as bullets or clauses (subject/predicate).

Ø     Left Side:  Define terms and concepts here, based on the terms and concepts being discussed on Right Side.

Ø     Bottom of the assignment:  Once you get to the last notation, draw a horizontal line across the page, and write a 5-sentence summary of everything you just learned by making your notes.

That’s it! 

Feel free to email me with questions or problems; that’s what I’m here for.  I honestly don’t mind; however, I may redirect many of your questions back to the blog.  Meanwhile, have a thought provoking summer full of family, friends and extra sleep, and I’ll see you in September, ready to go. 

We begin the year with a reading test and a baseline timed write.

~~~ Alexandra Fletcher            afletcher[at]busd.k12.ca.us           

The Summer Homework Grading Rubric

This is what I will be looking as I grade your summer work, worth 460 points.

Writer’s Notebook — 15 points  Good, durable notebook; college ruled; 3 subjects; all summer work organized in first section; written neatly by hand, in blue or black ink; student name on the back cover

Aldous Huxley — 100 points (7 entries worth 20 points each)

Ø     passage under discussion copied verbatim (you may use ellipses if appropriate – be discerning); page number must be cited

Ø     journal entries should be tied to issues raised by Professor Robert Berring’s passage; topics beyond this area should be taken to the blog for exploration and discussion

Ø     Responses should be well developed and supported with evidence from reading, observation or experience

Ø     I utilize a 9-point AP rubric and convert that rubric to points as follows: 

o      9-8:  effective: clearly written, analytical, insightful; the errors are minimal.  The “9” represents a score that is unexpected in its fluency, range, and control of language:  (18-20 points)

o      7-6:  adequate:  less thorough, less perceptive, less specific than a 9-8 paper; adequately written; a recognizable essay, but demonstrating less control or insight than the 9-8 (16-17 points)

o      5:  inconsistent:  this essay shows inconsistent control of the elements of writing; errors are beginning to be pervasive; sentences are mechanical, pedestrian.  However, the essay manages to stay focused on passage, and is sufficient to convey the writer’s ideas (15 points)

o      4-3: a below average response which maintains the general idea of the writing assignment, and shows some sense of organization, but overall, the writing reveals weakness in maturity of thought, language facility, and/or mechanics (13-14 points)

o      2-1: these essays compound the weaknesses of the 4-3, or are unacceptably brief.  The writer may have substituted a simpler task such as plot summary or personal diatribe.  In no case may an essay with many distracting errors in grammar score higher than a 2 (12 points and below)

Neil Postman — 100 points

Ø     All eleven chapters covered

Ø     Summaries are cogent, coherent and no more than 3-4 sentences long; summaries correctly identify main ideas; summaries correctly identify Postman’s evidence

Ø     Errors in grammar, sentence structure, spelling and usage are minimal; errors do not distract

Ø     Grading is holistic; that is, I consider the work in its entirety and score it on the same 9-point scale described above; the point values are merely increased 5 times.

Nicolas Carr — 100 points

Ø     Five essays written; passages identified and page numbers cited; each essay is worth 10 points

Ø     One randomly selected essay will receive a close read, utilizing the 9-point AP rubric described above.  This randomly selected essay score is worth 50 additional points.

Blogging at http://apbloggers1213.blogspot.com — 100 points

Ø     4 Threads @ minimum 150 words each; elements of good writing apply – 15 points each = 60

Ø     8 Comments that move beyond the “me too!” response — 5 points each = 40

Ø     Penalties for late starts:  Begin August 8, (-25);  August 15, (-50)

Ø     All entries in any one week:  your earned score x 50%

Cornell Notes for Sam Anderson’s article, “Just One More Game…” — 45 points

Ø     15 notations, worth 2 points each (15x2=30)

Ø     5-sentence summary, worth 15 points (clarity, conciseness, correctness)