One of the assignments that I am most proud of is my Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf American
Drama project. One of the reasons that I am so proud of this assignment is the
experience that I had with Edward Albee’s play. When I read this play,
throughout the entire play I was convinced that it was the strangest, most
absurd work of literature that has ever existed. After I finished reading it,
however, and really delved in Martha’s character and actually understood why
she is what she is, I realized that Edward Albee is in fact a genius. And I
think that this is why it was so important for us to act out scenes from our
play, because if I hadn’t, I would have had an entirely different, much less
enjoyable experience with Who’s Afraid of
Virginia Woolf. Now, I would
consider it the best play I have ever read (sorry Shakespeare… Hamlet just doesn’t do it for me).
The
American Drama project is one of my favorite pieces on my blog not only because
of the play itself but also because of the commitment and involvement that was
necessary to achieve the final project. In my opinion, the most important
component of success is the effort that is invested into achieving that
success. And the effort that my group invested into this project is definitely
a strength of this assignment. To me, when I think about how our thesis started
and how it finished, the change was monumental. Or even the contrast between what
our video was like after the first edit and how it was after the last edit is
extraordinary. A weakness that I encountered during this assignment was
definitely time management and knowing when to let go. For instance, when I was
editing the video, I had to cut the scenes to reduce the length of the video,
and I got so attached to every scene. I spent such a long time watching and
rewatching the video trying to determine what to cut. I’ve definitely learned
from this experience that in group projects, it’s important to care about the
project and the effort going into it, but at the same time it’s also important
to remain objective and be able to let go and cut my losses.
The other
assignment that I am very proud of is my creative project. Over the summer,
reading Midnight’s Children was very
difficult. It is such an intricate and detailed text, especially considering
the fact that I had a hard time understanding the political and religious
aspects of the text, that this novel required a lot of focus. At the same time,
however, it was so beautifully written that this fact often made up for the
missed plot points. I definitely like the project that I was able to come up
with using the political implications of the text. To me, a strength of my
project would definitely be the depth to which I was able to grasp the
political message of the novel and be able to translate that into not only a
thesis but also a video. Going off of this idea, I think that a weakness of
this assignment would be the fact that I know I could have gone further. There
is still so much meaning that has yet to be discovered for me in that novel
that I wish I had gone deeper into the significance of the text. From this
assignment, I learned about the political meaning that a text could have. When
I read the Foster chapter “It’s All Political”, Foster said that almost all
texts have a political meaning, and through this project I have learned how to
find the political meaning of a text. Obviously not all texts will present it
in the same way that Rushdie did, but, I think that having this experience will
make it a lot easier for me to know what devices to look for, such as allusions
and symbolism, that can illuminate a political meaning.
I have always
considered myself to be a very introspective, contemplative person. I have
seen, however, a change in this during my trimester in AP English. While I
still like to think, I have become much better at being able to articulate my
ideas because of the focus that is put on being able to enunciate your ideas in
this class. It all really started with the group poetry PowerPoints. My group
and I would have vigorous chat discussions about one word in the thesis (should
we say the poem shows, expresses, or demonstrates the meaning?) and I would
have to defend the decisions that I made in the PowerPoint to my group as well
as to the class during a presentation. I can come up with as many ideas as I
want, but if I can’t defend them, then they’re useless. I think the experiences
had with my original poetry group translated into my group for the American
Drama project. For that project, I believe that being able to articulate and
defend my ideas led me to not only be able to write a better thesis, but I also
took a more prominent role in planning everything and making sure everything
got done. In addition, this has affected my individual writing. For instance,
for the Angela’s Ashes compare and
contrast essay, I wrote seven pages of analysis of both the text and the film,
which I never would have been able to do before. I was able to not only come up
with ideas concerning the novel and the film but also explain it to the point
that my essay ended up being seven pages long.
Other
results of the initial group PowerPoints have stuck with me during this
trimester. I remember, when we were writing our PowerPoints, I would ask in the
chat “Is it okay if I change slide 6” or something along these lines because I
was nervous about changing someone else’s slide. The next message in the chat
was another one of my group members saying, “I trust you, and you don’t need to
ask permission to change something.” And this has definitely stuck with me, in
that the environment in this class is definitely different than classes that
I’ve been in before. In this class, I feel so much freer to share my ideas. I
think a lot of this comes from all of us in AP English being so close to one
another and the trust that we develop towards each other. Because of this,
participating in groups and in class is so much more natural because of the
environment that exists.
After I
took the exam at the very beginning of the trimester, I was very nervous about
being able to improve my ability to analyze literature, especially poetry. At
that point, I had not had much experience with poetry. So, I set a goal for
myself to read a poem once a week. This is a goal that I have definitely
followed up upon since I made this goal twelve weeks ago. I have been reading
poems by some of the authors that we have read in class, especially Anne
Sexton. I think her poems are so profound and emotional and I like to read
them. Something else that I’ve been doing that is based off of this goal,
though not specifically mentioned in this goal, is that I listen to a lot of
slam poetry on youtube. My favorite slam poem is called Shrinking Women and I have listened to it so many times that I have
some of the stanzas memorized. Even though I’m not reading poetry technically,
I have found that it has really helped me. When I read other poems now, I’m
more aware of how poems would be read aloud and this helps me to understand the
poem. In my opinion, reading a poem aloud gives an entirely new level of
understanding, and since I cannot read any of the poems on an exam aloud,
having the voice in my head be able to replicate what a poem would be like read
aloud is very helpful to me. So far, having this goal in place has been very
helpful, and that it is definitely something that I should continue. In the
future, however, I am going to refine this goal by making sure that at least
every few weeks, I read a poem that is not from the modern or postmodern era.
As much as I like the poems from these literary periods, there will be poems
from all of the other literary periods also on exams in the future. So, I need
to make sure I am exposed to other types of poems as well as the poems that I
am already reading.
In my exam
reflection, I also made a goal to close read every text that we do for class,
and this is something that I have also followed up on. I have improved my close
reading with poetry especially, and I’ve found that stopping to close read
helps me to understand a poem because by looking more extensively at sections
of a poem it can help illuminate the meaning of the work as a whole. For
instance, when we read a Sylvia Plath poem a few weeks, the first time that I
read it, I had no idea what the poem meant. But then after going back and
looking at smaller portions of the text and being able to close read and
annotate and really determine what the meaning of each portion of the text
helped me understand the meaning as a whole. For instance, the first time I
read it, I didn’t get the phoenix allusion at the end, but by going back and
close reading, I was able to realize what Plath was talking about in that section,
as well as how the phoenix contributed to the overall theme. This goal has been
harder for me to follow in terms of prose passages, especially for longer works
like Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf,
where I get so caught up in the story and what is happening that I often forget
to mark literary devices, etc., so I think that I should refine this goal a
bit. When I read prose passages, at the end of every few pages, I will stop
reading and think to myself whether or not I annotated, and if I did not,
whether or not there was anything that needed to be annotated (such as a
passage I didn’t fully understand the meaning of). Overall, I think that I have
done well sticking to my goals so far, but that I should continue each of these
goals because I am far from perfect on either point. I am definitely looking
forward to continuing my progress next trimester.
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