As of tonight, you will have finished your first full foray into Section I of the AP Exam. I’ll sort those data on my end; you will spend the next four days continuing to produce data, starting with the second free-response essay. Budget 10-15 minutes per night to complete the succinct self-analysis outlined today.
Oh, and you should know that I’m away at a conference for the rest of the week. If you need my help, use one of the interstitial mechanisms available to you — email, Classroom, Google+, or this site. (The comment section might be dusty, but it still works.) Remember that a post like this is quite literally me teaching you. Go slowly, take notes, ask questions, etc. Bad habits will begin to do real damage at this point.
The Final Free-Response Essay
We practiced the general argument essay on this exam back when you were first introduced to the AP, which is a moment worth revisiting:
There is a lot of information in that post. It’s possible that you didn’t internalize all of it when you first read it, but we’ll get back to that in a moment. For now, I bring it up to show you that you’ve written a timed general argument as well as the synthesis essay from the 2016 exam. Now you have only one essay left to practice in this interminable spiral: the rhetorical analysis response.
We’ve saved this essay for now for a few reasons. It’s the most test-specific of the writing you’ll do, which makes it relatively useless to you after May 10; Section I of the exam helps to build your ability to read passages and deconstruct them quickly; it’s the quickest essay to write, for most students; and most importantly, it’s the kind of writing you’ve practiced most often this year, although we call it emulation-through-analysis or ETA work. In all your English classes, in fact, rhetorical (or literary) analysis has been what you’ve practiced most often. The rhythms of it are familiar to you, and the multiple-choice work you’ve finished should have you in the right frame of mind for this specific version.
To prepare for this part of the exam, you should
- read this preparatory guide (or one like it);
- take 40 minutes to write your own response to the 2016 FR2 prompt; and then
- analyze the College Board’s scoring guide and sample responses.
That means that your assignment, starting on April 25, is to write a response to the rhetorical analysis prompt from the 2016 practice exam. By the time you finish, there will be a follow-up assignment related to the scoring guides and exemplars. Your real focus, once you’ve finished the last sentence of that response, is this:
An Autodidactic Sprint
When that Cthulhu-inspired post was given to you on January 31, it kicked off the second semester’s growing focus on the AP Exam. Diligent students will have noticed that we’ve been increasing the speed and frequency of our practice, with plenty of explanations and guides and Lovecraftian metaphors thrown in along the way.
Writing the rhetorical analysis gives you all the data you need to set your own schedule for the next two weeks. Two days ago, you were also given the final resources:
That post is clear enough, but I’ll reiterate its two most important links:
These folders have also been placed at the top of the right menu on this site and on the “About” page of Google Classroom. Note: The links are locked to Brewster accounts, which means you’ll need to sign into Google to access them. The explanation for that is with Alice in the post from April 23.
You should already be delving into those folders, because you should already have read the post asking you to do that. Regardless, those are your resources for the last two weeks before the exam.
In the “Practice” folder, you’ll find complete exams from 2013, 2014, 2015, and 2016, with 2016 materials carefully separated out and labeled; additionally, you’ll find practice free-response prompts for each type of question from 2007-2014. (I haven’t updated those yet with the essays from 2015 and 2016, because there’s no need.)
In the “Guides” folder, you’ll find the exam overview I compiled for you, plus separate guides I wrote for each of the free-response questions. The subfolder labeled “Language of Composition (Textbook)” contains, as you might guess, helpful excerpts from the AP textbook we’ve used before. More on that folder in a moment.
The idea here is obvious, but bear with me: You have everything you need to practice what you need to practice before May 10, and that makes the lessons and feedback loops and discussions and so on your call. All I will do is serve as the expert on the skills, traits, and knowledge required.
My only blanket suggestion is that you read the guides carefully, including the excerpts scanned in the textbook folder. Reading through the textbook — and you’ve already seen a lot of what’s in there — is the most straightforward way to set yourself up to work with me and your peers next week, when the pace picks up even more.
One more note: Photocopies of a lot of this stuff will be available starting on April 25. Next to my desk, you’ll find excerpts from The Language of Composition, although I should tell you that I scanned my copy, which is more recent than those paper copies. Check above the surge protector. On the bookshelf by the door, you’ll find any remaining copies of our 2016 practice. I’ve asked one of your peers to pick up copies of a few of the multiple-choice sections from downstairs, too, and she will put those somewhere visible.
Now let’s go over your week again, assuming that you’re caught up through tonight’s Section I work:
- Write your rhetorical analysis response.
- Go through the Google Drive exam folders.
- Start your individual exam prep.
Keep up with the nightly self-analysis, too, and expect to spend part of Friday’s period completing a GAP report for the first triptych panel of Q4. I’ll post any other information, updates, and instruction here and on Google Classroom. Ask questions! I will do my best to get back to you as quickly as I can, and I’d like to see if we can test the interstitial capabilities of our course over the next four days.