Response to Course Materials 7

No clever titles this time.  I can't think of anything.

So what have we done recently in class?  Lots of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead.  It's actually a pretty great read.  A little hard to understand, at times, to be sure, but there's a lot to think about in the text and what it means for the audience and life as a whole.  The confusing bits are almost reminiscent of The American Dream, like I said before.  Actually, I think what really helped a lot was the movie.  It showed a cool new perspective on it that Tom Stoppard himself was responsible for, since he directed it.  And the articles helped too, though I still think the one about Shakespeare essentially being the god of authors and the play to be a bit out-there.  But I guess that's the point of literature; to put ideas out there, no matter how radical they seem at times.

What else have we done recently?  We've actually done some more work on writing.  I know I missed the discussion of our essays on Friday, but who knows, I may still be able to figure out some things to write about.  At any rate, I think the practice is definitely helpful, even if I don't particularly like writing essays in class (honestly, who does?).  Still, considering we're going to have to do it on the AP exam, it's a good idea to get some practice in now, so we have an idea of what to include and how to time ourselves.  I feel like the Close Prompts may actually be more difficult, because they seem to be looking for very specific things about the readings which I'm afraid I might miss sometimes.  I'm also worried about my ability of picking out the meaning behind the piece.  Hopefully having more feedback will help.

And most recently, we started working on reading Ceremony.  I actually really like it.  It's interesting to read from the perspective of a non-Western-white-culture (that doesn't actually make much sense, I know).  I feel like there aren't enough books written from the perspective of minority groups and I really like the insights that it gives on the life of Laguna Pueblos.  Also, it's certainly intriguing with the stream-of-consciousness narration and unsteady timeline.  I find myself getting confused at times, but it's also really fun to try and figure out.  I feel like I'll be going through a lot of sticky notes to annotate it; my copy of the book is too nice and I don't want to write on it!  Anyway, I can't wait to explore it more!