See--

Paintings inspired by poems (AP Class of 2012)

Guidance from Flannery O'Connor

In her essay "Writing Short Stories," American Author Flannery O'Connor wrote:

"Learning to see is the basis for learning all the arts except music.  I know a good many fiction writers who paint, not because they're any good at painting, but because it helps their writing.  It forces them to look at things.  Fiction writing is very seldom a matter of saying things; it is a matter of showing things."

Teaching by Theme: Seeing

For my 2012-2013 AP class, our overarching theme will be SEEING.  We will analyze issues relating to how we see the world, how different characters see the world, how different authors, poets, and artists see the world.

We will be looking for ideas relating to:
having VISION
being BLIND
finding PERSPECTIVE
people WATCHING
being JUDGED

We will be starting our class in the fall with the unit that I develop this summer on the correlation between really seeing a work of art and closely analyzing and "seeing" a poem.  Over the summer, the students will be reading Hosseini's The Kite Runner, and we will talk about how the novel allows us to see an Afghanistan not often presented on the news.  For the first time in a couple of years, I will go back to teaching Sophocles's Oedipus Rex for all of its complex messages on seeing and blindness.  "Seeing" will be an important topic as well as we read Hurston's Their Eyes Were Watching God, Achebe's Things Fall Apart, Shakespeare's Hamlet, Styron's A Tidewater Morning, Camus's The Stranger and several others.

Teaching by Theme: Place

This year was the first year that I taught using an overarching theme as a link amongst all of the units in both my American Authors classes and my AP English Literature and Composition class.  In American Authors, we focused on the theme of "The American Dream" during first semester, which included units on Steinbeck's Of Mice and Men, Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby, giving a speech using a song to explain your life philosophy, and writing a research paper on a career.  Second semester, we have been discussing the overarching theme of "The American Reality."  We read Miller's The Crucible, Kesey's One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, and we are currently finishing Wright's Native Son.  We also did a unit on Poetry, and the students wrote their College Application Essays.

In AP English, the theme was PLACE.  I decided on this theme after having assigned Hardy's Tess of the d'Urbervilles as summer reading and also requiring that all students subscribe to National Geographic magazine.  I was trying to decide how I was going to connect these two very different types of reading assignments when I stumbled across the 1991 Question Three AP Prompt which asks students to compare the significance of two different places in a novel or play.  Aha!  Place was it.

With every unit, students discussed the idea of Place.  Does your physical place in the world matter?  Place in time?  Place in your family?  Place in your society?  What if you feel that you have no place?  For each novel and play, we returned to questions relating to Place. We kept a bulletin board in the back of the room where students posted images that they felt related to the theme of Place.  In some fantastic cosmic coincidence, the final essay question on the AP exam this year related to the theme of Place.

The First Field Trip

My research has begun! Fifteen of my current AP students and I went on a field trip to the Milwaukee Art Museum on Thursday to do some exploring. Students worked to help me brainstorm ideas for how my field trip to the Art Museum will work in the fall with my new AP classes. My sister majored in Painting at the Milwaukee Institute of Art and Design and works in the custom framing industry; she joined us as a chaperone and guide.

We spent the morning casually browsing the Museum together. For lunch, we ate a picnic outside, and then the students spent the afternoon parked in front of a painting of their choice working through an analysis sheet and then composing a poem inspired by the painting. They will be sharing what they wrote in class this coming Tuesday.

Research Begins!