Response to Course Materials

Well it has been a long while since the last time that we  responded to course materials. Before Christmas! Wow.

A long long time ago we were finishing up Hamlet, and I remember like 3 weeks of discussion. I really like Hamlet over all. The whole idea of the play is pretty easy to relate to: young fella being forced to come home and deal with all the unbearable drama that he wanted to escape when he initially left. Anybody else feel the same way? I know that just being a high schooler on the cusp of graduation fosters feelings similar to our prince Hamlet.

Final Exams were not at all bad in this class. At all. I was really pleased with my group considering we had such a hard time figuring out what we were actually going to talk about... I wish we could have group projects for finals in all of my classes!

Something that we recently started doing on our blogs is open prompt posts. This is new to me, I didn't really know how to do them really, so I winged it. At least part one was harder for me because I am TERRIBLE at editing/criticizing other people's work especially on AP essays. The part two blog post was easier because I just treated it like writing a free response essay, it was probably terrible but there was no hour of contemplation before beginning. Overall, I think they will become easier the more that we do them.

Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead. We started reading, finished reading, and started discussing the play and it certainly is interesting. I think this may be the hardest work that we have read so far because so much of the content relies on stage direction and visual aid that you can't really get from just reading it aloud as a class. I would also like to comment on how depressing our general discussions in class have been. I kept catching myself zoning out and pondering the meaning of life. At least its sixth hour so I'm not out of it for the rest of my classes. Is there a God? Is there a point? Do we have free will? Even if we do have free will, what is the point of using it if it is for nothing in the end? This play is tripping me out.

Open Prompt Part Two: 2003

2003 Prompt: According to critic Northrop Frye, “Tragic heroes are so much the highest points in their human landscape that they seem the inevitable conductors of the power about them, great trees more likely to be struck by lightning than a clump of grass. Conductors may of course be instruments as well as victims of the divisive lightning.” Select a novel or play in which a tragic figure functions as an instrument of the suffering of others. Then write an essay in which you explain how the suffering brought upon others by that figure contributes to the tragic vision of the work as a whole.

Summary and Analysis of Hamlet by William Shakespeare

Author

William Shakespeare

Setting

The setting of Hamlet is in Elsinore, Denmark, and is centered around the royal court. Late middle ages.

Characters

Hamlet: Prince of Denmark

Claudius: King of Denmark, and Hamlet's Uncle

Gertrude: the Queen; Hamlet's mother, and recently remarried

The ghost: the late King, Hamlet's father

Polonius: an elderly Councilor of State

Laertes: son of Polonius

Ophelia: daughter of Polonius

Horatio: Hamlet's friend

Rosencrantz and Guildenstern: courtiers, and formerly fellow students of Hamlet

Fortinbras: Prince of Norway

Response to Course Materials

Basically the only thing we have discussed over the past few weeks is Hamlet.

We finished reading the text itself a two weeks ago. I was not there on the last day so I missed Andrew's dramatic reading of Hamlet's character, but I read it separate so I think I got the just of it. I really liked reading the original version because it allowed me to visualize the play myself rather than watching interpretations. But, at the same time, the text had basically no stage directions so for all I know I was not even visualizing it in the first place.

After we finished reading the text, we watched various versions of film. The first was the David Tennant banana version and I probably liked it the least. This was because I didn't like how they mixed up the order of some scenes and had every scene in the same room. I think that the movie was supposed to reflect acting it out on a stage, but really the story itself is suppose to take place in many different rooms in a castle, and they lost that aspect by filming in one giant marble room. Making a play into a movie is a great opportunity to make use of settings that you can't provide in a theater. I liked the other versions for the same reason, they made use of placing the play into the real world. My favorite was probably the black and white version, and I plan to watch the entire thing soon. My favorite Hamlet was also from the black and white version. I can't really pin point why, but I sort of got the best feel for the character from that actor, where I felt that the other actors were trying too hard.

Now for the discussion of the play itself. There really is so much to consider about Hamlet, I would really like to interpret it in the most extreme sense, where Hamlet was hot for Horatio and Ophelia was knocked up by Laeretes. I also think that Fortinbras is the most underrated character in the entire play. He was Hamlet's foil in the sense that he listened and respected his Uncle after he took the throne prior to his fathers death. I think this also supports the conclusion that if Hamlet had been confronted by the same situation in a setting other than Elsinore, he would have turned out much differently. Fortinbras was the control of Shakespeare experiment. His experiment basically exemplifies how everything goes down the drain when you lock a bunch of social-maniacal people with no sense of logic or moral judgment withing close proximity of each other.

Over all I think that these last few weeks before brake have be tortuous and I cannot wait until Christmas. Thank god for AP lit for actually allowing me to have a bit of fun at the end of my day!

Response to Course Materials

These past couple weeks have been incredibly long. I found myself more often than not running on less than 5 hours of sleep and caffeine, which, might I add, makes 6th hour mighty difficult to get through.

We finally finished Death of a Salesman. I feel like we spent more time on this than the American Dream, but did not get into as much detail. We created our theme statement as a class: Prioritizing success over moral values will harm others and cause personal failure. We concluded that Willy's obsession over his ambitions in commercial America were destructive to both his family and his own life. We also found that both The American Dream and Death of a Salesman have similar themes in exemplifying how specific attitudes toward societal roles is inevitably destructive in some way. 

Before we began reading Hamlet, we read and annotated "Elizabethan Theater" and "The Renaissance". These two pieces explained the cultural context of the time period that Hamlet was written, which is helpful when considering different perspectives. For example, Ms. Holmes explained the significance of Hamlet studying in Wittenberg, which was the epicenter of the beginnings of Protestantism, where Martin Luther supposedly nailed his grievances to the door of a Catholic church. 

Shortly after reading those pieces, we began reading Hamlet. I really am enjoying it so far, for out of the small collection of Shakespeare's play that I am familiar with, Hamlet is definitely my favorite. This may be in part because I can't help but picture Hamlet as Mel Gibson, who is incredibly attractive, but I digress. I love how the play not only has a plot that is complex and interesting, but also has an underlying political relevance to Elizabethan times, such as Hamlet's comment if incest to his mother and Claudius. I am really excited to figure out what the whole point of the play really is compared to the simplified lessons I received on it in the 10th grade at Corunna.

The next activity that I am going to talk about does not have a name, Well, it does have a name, but for whatever reason, it escapes me. Basically what we do is flip through a bunch of pictures on a power point and collectively decide which is the most controversial (If you are in 6th hour, you will know exactly what I mean by controversial). Then, we argue for about 15 minutes about which words from the word bank describe the picture. Then, when we have finally figured out what kind of mood we want to allude to, we attempt at writing a paragraph that actively describes the picture in the way we want it to, while at the same time does not directly state the mood. By the time we have reached this point, everyone in the class is frustrated, including Ms, Holmes, and we may even receive a lecture on productivity before the bell rings. Hence the phrase, "saved by the bell".

Another thing that we did in class was practice writing our AP test essays. I was absent on Monday when we got a really helpful lesson on introductory paragraphs. I am still not completely confident that I know what I am doing in that area of essay writing, but I think I got the just of it from Vanessa the next day. We basically were given a formula for writing introductions, and to use that for the structure of the body paragraphs. We wrote about Death of a Salesman, which I found to be more difficult than The American Dream.

All in all, we have gotten through a lot of material the past couple of weeks in class. I do feel that we could be a lot more productive in my class, but at least we are a lively bunch!