American Romanticism / The Ways We Argue

We are starting our first full week at Orcutt Academy.  Today, English 11 got an introduction to American Romanticism and AP Language and Composition began looking at the varies purposes, occasions, and kinds of arguments.

English 11 - Today, we tried to get at what exactly the Romantic movement was all about.  We established that the Romantics valued feeling and intuition over rational thought.  This concept can be difficult to grasp and, in some of my periods, we got at it by comparing some music from the Baroque period and some music from the Romantic era.  Specifically, we compared Bach's restrained, rational Brandenburg Concertos with the emotional whirlwind that is Beethoven's Fifth Symphony.  After establishing some key features of American Romanticism, we dipped into Annie Dillard's "Living Like Weasels".  I enjoyed reading the Dillard piece along with my students as it allowed me to grapple with my own feelings about the Romantic movement.  Romantics so frequently called for us to escape the rational deliberations and reflections that rule our lives and to embrace a connection with our intuition and the ineffable.  However, it is problematic to escape because the thing that separates us from living by instinct like weasels is the human capacity for language.   It seems impossible to get past this facility that makes us unique by offering us the power of reflection and deliberation.  Over the course of the day, I made my peace with Dillard by better understanding, with the help of my students, that perhaps we must look only to these moments beyond language as places of rejuvenation much like Wordsworth's memory of the river Wye in "Tintern Abbey".

AP Comp - We quickly looked over the results from the practice AP multiple choice test and got an idea of what work would lie ahead over the next few months.  Hopefully, the test gave students a better understanding of what skills they would be developing and perfecting.  We then grabbed our three heavy textbooks from the library and went to work on one.  We split up a chapter on purposes, occasions, and kinds of arguments.  In high school, I missed this lesson on argumentation and it kept from really getting in touch with the goals authors had.  I'm hoping by going through this material early we can better understand what authors are trying to achieve and what we ourselves are trying to achieve when we write.  AP students, I put the notes we generated on my staff page under the heading AP Notes.