News – Page 214 – Quixotic Pedagogue

Existentialism Quiz for Debate

Your final quiz for debate class will cover the basic concepts of existentialism and the philosophers we’ve studied in the past week. Make sure that you remember to bring a note card and study, as this will be a challenging quiz. Review notes on:

basics of existentialism
Sartre
Camus
Malraux
Kirkegaard
Nietzsche

June 3, 2011/by dpogreba

AP Language Final

AP Language News

The final for AP Language is a oral presentation with three components and a brief written element:

A Beowulf-style boast about your achievements this year (oral)
A favorite moment with another student in the class this year (oral)
A passage from the reading that we read this year that moved or changed you in some way (oral)
A brief letter reflecting on your writing portfolio (written, no more than 3 paragraphs)

The oral portion of the presentation only needs to be one-two minutes long.

June 2, 2011/by dpogreba

Summer Reading AP Literature

Student Blogs

1. Required Text for All Students

The Odyssey – Homer (translations in order of preference by instructor)

Translation by E.V. Rieu. London: Penguin, 1946. This edition is available for check-out in Room 41 during the final week of school in June.
Revised Translation by D.C.H. Rieu. London: Penguin, 1991.ISBN 0-14-044556-0

2. Book of Choice

Each student should choose a second work of literary merit for her summer reading. Any work that is both challenging and possessed of literary merit will work for summer reading. Some works you might consider are located in these lists:

A List of Classic texts.

Mr. Pogreba’s Suggestions

Underworld by Don DeDillo
Les Miserables by Victor Hugo
The Easter Parade by Richard Yates
The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao by Junot Diaz
Blindness by Jose Saramago
One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel Garcia Marquez
A Prayer for Owen Meany by John Irving
The Blind Assassin by Margaret Atwood
Let the Great World Spin by Colum McCann
The Naked and the Dead by Norman Mailer
The White Tiger by Aravind Adiga

Mr. Salisbury’s Suggestions

Harold Bloom: Shakespeare-The Invention of the Human
Virginia Woolf: A Room of One’s Own
Walt Whitman: Leaves of Grass
Anton Chekhov: Collected Stories
Jonathan Swift: Gulliver’s Travels
Earnest Hemmingway: The Sun Also Rises
Emily Bronte: Wuthering Heights
Aphra Behn: Oroonoko
William Shakespeare: Twelfth Night
Ken Kesey: One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest

3. Titles to Avoid

Because you may read these works in class, avoid these titles for your summer reading:

Invisible Man
Heart of Darkness

King Lear
The Inferno
Beowulf
Resurrection
Crime and Punishment
Love in the Time of Cholera
Great Expectations
Death of a Salesman
The Road
Hamlet
Antigone
Wuthering Heights
Pride and Prejudice
The Lake of the Woods
Catch-22
1984
As I Lay Dying
Siddhartha
Things Fall Apart
Slaughterhouse Five
The Stranger
Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man

4. Read More!

Spending time in the summer reading an additional title or two (along with some excellent poetry) will make you better prepared for AP Literature, college, and life as a fully realized human being.