Help! - Keanu Gomez

As an AP English class, your class turned out to be way different than what I expected. I envisioned your class to be spent memorizing and learning the technical terms associated with the rhetoric of English. However, it’s kind of funny because my Latin teacher taught me more technical terms and actual English content than you did. Every day he elaborates on the presence and usage of terms like: metonymy, synecdoche, asyndeton, hysteron-proteron, etc. as we analyze the Aeneid. But your class really proves that success is possible on the AP exam without knowing this intellectual-sounding verbiage. Being a student who never really struggled with writing before but was never really amazing at it, the timed nature of the writing proved to be a challenge for me. Since your class was built around the AP exam itself, I thought that your methods along with the countless number of practice we did was very good preparation for the test.

With that said, even after spending a lot of time learning how to write “organically”, I still found it difficult to use this approach to the analysis essay. I thought this approach was more accessible depending on the prompt and the piece to be analyzed. I found it challenging to use the “organic” approach to every analysis essay. However, after reading so many of the standard five-paragraph essays, I really liked the “organic” style and I thought that it inevitably made the writing more engaging, thus leading to a higher score. So, I think you should definitely introduce this approach sooner and should spend more time getting your students accustomed to using it. Try to maybe go through an analysis essay together with the class and write a live class essay to more effectively teach them how to write in this style. I think that nurturing the “organic” approach will yield better results on the analysis essay than the tedious Socratic seminars. 

Yes, like most other students, I will now also talk about the finals. First of all, you making the finals a project instead of a written exam gave me very mixed emotions. In some ways, I appreciated the fact that the finals were indeed more “artistically” engaging, but they were nevertheless still stressful, and in some moments they produced more stress than a written exam. Personally, I thought the speech project was a great experience. It may be weird to say, but I kind of “liked” writing my speech in that it was not that difficult to share my thoughts on a topic I chose. Although the actual speech delivery was indeed nerve-wracking, it proved to be a valuable experience. On the other hand, I really dislike the 2^nd semester final. I think that it requires too much prior video production experience/knowledge that most students don’t (or don’t need to) have. I guess that it will also be a nice experience, but as of now it is generating too much stress that I don’t need after just taking a bunch of AP exams and preparing for finals.