We kicked off this week with some Syria. In A.P. Government, we had been discussing the overseas conflicts in depth, but not necessarily the domestic impact which was covered in the article by Meghan Daum. We then moved to poetry, which was a major theme this week. Before, I had never before had to write an essay about a work that was less than ten pages, let alone two stanzas. But surprisingly, the poem was so rich with content and intrigue that it was not as hard as I had expected it to be to formulate and follow a thesis statement based on a poem like "The Eagle." So, when reading the poem essays written by the students, I was not surprised to find them to be very well written. Well, besides the one with a score of two, that is. After reading the essay with a score of 9, I understood what the test graders were looking for: length, eloquence, vocabulary, and sound analysis. I kept these in mind as I studied "Cross" by Langston Hughes.
I absolutely LOVED "Cross." I mean, I typically love any work musical , literary, or other that comes out of the Harlem Renaissance, but this really struck me. What seems like such a simple poem is actually a specific representation of a universal question, which really made me think about similarities between the main idea of the poem and what separates literature and commercial fiction, a large theme in last week's curriculum.
I look forward to continuing our Literature projects next week, and I hope that the focus of the assignment will become more clear to me as I work on it with my group members
Mia
I absolutely LOVED "Cross." I mean, I typically love any work musical , literary, or other that comes out of the Harlem Renaissance, but this really struck me. What seems like such a simple poem is actually a specific representation of a universal question, which really made me think about similarities between the main idea of the poem and what separates literature and commercial fiction, a large theme in last week's curriculum.
I look forward to continuing our Literature projects next week, and I hope that the focus of the assignment will become more clear to me as I work on it with my group members
Mia