Equiano / Rhetorical Analysis

English 11 - Today, we began looking at slave narratives - the first person accounts of enslaved blacks who escaped or were released from captivity.  These narratives are incredibly important in helping us understand both our country's history and its literary character.  Slave narratives give us peeks into the experiences of slaves, but also helped develop American literary traditions that one typically does not associate with slavery.  For example, one of the major tropes of American storytelling is the story of escape - be it from society or enslavement.  The heroic journey out of slavery and captivity paves the way for everything from Thoreau's Walden to contemporary movies like Iron Man.  Additionally, the horrors of the Middle Passage, the bizzare tortures used by slaveholders, and the hiding and confinement experienced as the slave escaped greatly informed the horrors of American Gothic writers like Edgar Allan Poe, Herman Melville, and Nathaniel Hawthorne.  Today, we started working with Olaudah Equiano's Interesting Narrative of the Life and got a peek into the barbaric nature of the slavetraders who oversaw the Middle Passage.  Equiano's piece is most famous for the way it reverse the script - instead of following the white traveler who encounters uncivilized and possibly cannibalistic blacks, Equiano depicts the black standing on the shore who encounters uncivilized and possibly cannibalistic white traders.  We will be diving into the piece more tomorrow and working on transforming out notes into a well-written academic paragraph.

AP - The AP exam asks students to flex their writing skill by writing three different kinds of essays in two hours.  So far, we have been working on the rhetorical analysis essay and today we began preparing for our first in-class AP rhetorical analysis essay.  We looked at the 2011 prompt that asked students to analyze a political speech by Florence Kelly.  First, we attacked it on our own and pointed out some ideas the we might bring up if we completed that essay.  Then, we looked through the rubric and discussed it.  I sent students home with three sample essays to score which we plan on going over tomorrow.   Getting to the rhetorical analysis essay has been a slow, steady process, but I have been extremely happy with the development that I've seen so far.  Hopefully, they'll be confident when they tackle a different prompt tomorrow.

Before AP class started, we discussed some articles that the students had read over the weekend.  I am highly encouraging that students read long-form non-fiction and news of high reading level as they prepare for the exam and I plan to post links to anything they bring up here so other students can grab a hold of it.  Nothing will be better for our class than maintaining an air of heightened academic discussion and debate that continues on outside of the classroom and provides additional preparation for students when they tackle the AP test.   Today, we talked about the leaked Mitt Romney comments and Salman Rushdie's discussion of the fatwa put on him after he published The Satanic Verses.