I will open this blog by saying that I am ecstatic that this is my last blog. I would also like to say that as much as I feel that writing will not be as prominent in my future engineering career, I have to say that the only saving grace for me in this AP Lit class was how much I enjoyed Mrs. Clinch's style of teaching. Had it not been for that, I would have been institutionalized for a mental condition pertaining to all the work we had to do.
In terms of the changes that I would make to this course, I feel that it is my civic duty as a high school student to say that the course load is astronomical. I know that we had an adequate amount of work in order to be prepared for the exam but I still think that this AP class required more work than all of my other AP classes combined.
Specifically, I feel that the Grendel notebook was a lot of work for minimum output. I found the great works charts to be much more helpful in reviewing for the exam as well as helping the specifics of the novel stick in my brain. While the poetry notebook was helpful, I feel that in terms of the specific national exam that we took, the information I gained from it was not really applicable to the questions we had. Other than the specific names and format of the sonnets, I really didn't apply the majority of what I learned while doing my poetry notebook.
Overall I felt that I enjoyed this class because it gave me an opportunity to read classic novels and plays that I'm sure are socially required to know. I also enjoyed the skills that I acquired in going deeper into the novel. Never before have I been able to find the symbols and allusions in books as I have been able to after this class.
