Literature is ART!!! It's also kind of interesting! That’s what I learned this week in AP Lit, that even though I read and interpret literature differently than I interpret art, it’s still something that can be viewed in a more imaginative way than what I previously thought to be true. I’m not the biggest fan of literature, but after this week in class I am going to try harder to notice the artistic elements of literature than I did before. I’d consider myself to be a creative person, and I love art, so when I look at art I think about it much deeper than I consider literature, which explains why I might understand a piece of art better than I can understand the meaning of literature that an author is trying to convey. Also, everyone’s perception of everything is different. Sometimes I forget this and end up feeling like everyone understands something but me, when in reality nobody’s understanding of a piece or art or literature is necessarily right except for the author’s. That being said, my perception of a piece may be totally different to someone else’s perception of a piece, which is totally fine. After this week, I think I’ll have a better understanding and appreciation for the literature that we’re going to read than I did before. When I start to train my mind on how to think about something without just seeing a page with a ton of difficult writing on it, I can actually understand what point an author was trying to communicate by the different poetic elements that they use. Overall, I’m finally beginning to understand how to critically think about literature! Comparing lit to art really helped me to think about it in a more creative way than I previously had, which is how my mind works. I’ve always kind of hated reading and understanding literature, but now that I can better understand it I think that I might actually enjoy it a little bit. Click the link below to read Literature as an Art Form from JournalPulp.com
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This week went by so fast that I almost couldn't remember what we learned, as it started to blend with weeks one and two towards the end. I feel like I've been going and going and going, and I haven't really had a chance to stop and breathe, let alone try to remember which lesson from the last five days of AP Lit specifically intrigued me. I think I'm going to use the quote from the board, "Don't use water to put out a grease fire" to help whoever's reading this to understand my progress in this class so far. I'll start with the grease. The grease would be my inability to understand literature (sometimes) in the way this class requires one to, and my very vague understanding of critical thinking when it comes to the understanding of the meanings of literature when we are to understand not only the literature itself, but also the different possible meanings of the writing besides what it may mean literally. The actual class itself is the burner, which is so demanding, intense, and a kind of stress I've felt before but that's familiar in the way where it's a huge burden sometimes. The burner is hot, and risky, just like one week of miscalculated reading can lead to a sudden drop in my grade, which, at the time, will feel impossible to recover with everything else going on in the class that I don't understand. When the burner and the grease mix, a fire is obviously a result, which in my poorly constructed metaphor would represent me crashing and burning, as I try to balance the critical thinking that this class demands with the fogginess of my brain filled with distractions from things outside of class. In the end, I try to put out my grease fire with water, which ends in me crashing and burning and understanding less and less how to understand the deep meaning behind the literature that I'm being told to critically think about. For now, I'm trying to find a better method to put out the fire. Read The Guardian article How to Read Literature by Terry Eagleton by clicking the link below.
This week has been an experience. On Monday, we set our reading rate, which I thought I would be able to accomplish as I'm usually good at keeping up with school work as it's given and not falling behind. I was very wrong. See, I forgot to factor in that I'm a swimmer, a team captain, a club president, a Sunday morning church service and Sunday night youth group attendee, a math class homework do-er, a psychology 100 nightly study-er, and many other things all while trying to include a healthy social life and sleep schedule. With all these things combined, I found it much harder than I'd previously thought to keep on task with my SSR book for AP Lit.
I learned many things this week that were important in class, but the one thing that seems to be sticking out to me the most wasn't a class lesson at all, but a life lesson. In the beginning of the week, Mr. Schoenborn said something that remained in my head for the rest of the week and probably will remain in my head forever; "You're always going to be busy, so it's pointless to make excuses.". You're probably wondering why I didn't listen to his words if they stuck out to me, but then you and I would be in the same boat. Overall, this week I had a very hard time juggling my involvement outside of school with the necessary time and focus I should've committed to completing school work and reading my SSR book. As i go into this next week, I won't be any less busy, but I'm going to try my absolute hardest to prioritize better and to accomplish more than I did during the second week of AP Lit. It's very important to me to maintain my work ethic and the respect I've built up from various teachers over the years because of it, and in a way I feel like I've failed myself in this class by not reaching the goals I've set so far. The moral of this post is that I learned a very valuable lesson in time management, and it's ironic but symbolic that I wore a watch for the first time today because it marks the start of me actually using it. See article Too-Busy Teens Feel Health Toll from the Washington Post by clicking the link below. The first week of school usually hits me like a truck, but thankfully this year so far has been different. As a senior, I didn’t feel the same amount of anxious that I usually do in the beginning of the school year, so I hope that sticks around. I was worried about taking an AP class on top of a dual enroll course and a math class, sports, and clubs, but now that I’m a week in, I don’t know what I was so worried about. First, I have a good class. When I walked in on the first day, the only people I recognized were three or four of my friends; I hadn’t seen most of my classmates before. On the first day of class we went outside and introduced ourselves and explained why we’re here and how we got here. Doing that activity made me realize that I wasn’t in a typical AP class, and I began to regret my decision of choosing to take it less and less as the hour went on. Throughout the week, this realization occurred to me more and more as we read poetry at the beginning of class every day, which I didn’t appreciate previously but started to enjoy towards the end of the week. The most memorable thing that I can take away this week was the discussion of immersion learning. As I thought more about it and about what I want to do with my life, I was able to connect it to my own life in a way that could affect my entire future. For my whole life I’ve wanted to learn American Sign Language, and I’ve been debating on whether or not I should sign up to take a course at CMU for the spring semester, and after this week I think I’m going to. In the future I want to be an occupational therapist, which definitely means I’ll be working with children who speak ASL or are learning ASL as their main form of communication. I think it would be a huge accomplishment to be able to communicate with the deaf community and understand their culture as a hearing person, and I plan on enrolling in a course as soon as I can after the discussion today. To relate this back to immersion learning, I want to be in a position where I know enough ASL to be thrown into a school or university of deaf students and be able to communicate and learn more from them in a short or extended period of time. Maybe, if immersion learning works for me, I could end up teaching or instructing members of the hearing impaired community as a career or just being able to communicate with ASL speaking people in general. I’m glad that this class has already opened my eyes to future opportunities that I’m going to investigate more. See How Immersion Helps to Learn a Language by the New York Times. |
Kayla Campbell
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November 2017
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