AP Lit: Week 6 - Projects and Stories

​ This week we have been focusing on our group projects where we pick a literary subject and study it and connect it to stories. My group chose theme and point of view. This has been a real adventure working with people that I don't usually work with, and it has been really fun. It's actually nice to work with different people because you have the opportunity to become closer friends with them, whereas you may not have otherwise. The stories that we chose for our project were "Hunters in the Snow", "The Boarding House", and "A Very Old Man With Enormous Wings". My personal favorite was "Hunters in the Snow", which was the short story we used for theme. At first, it was very hard to discover a theme for this story. We had some ideas, we knew that it had something to do with selfishness and bad friendships, but we didn't know how to phrase it. When we were learning about theme in our packets, we learned that a theme cannot be a subject, it has to be about a subject. Out of everything we learned this week, that was probably the one that had the biggest impact on me. It completely changed my perspective on theme. The theme couldn't just be "selfishness" or "carelessness", it had to be something about these topics that reveal a piece of humanity that the author is trying to express through the story. "The Boarding House" and "A Very Old Man With Enormous Wings" were relatively straightforward with regards to their point of view. I find that discovering the point of view of a story is much easier than deciphering a theme.

Since this was the end of the marking period, we had to finish our independent reading books and do an FRE(aka FRQ) on them. The book I read was "Black Like Me" by John Howard Griffin. This is a story about a man who studies civil justice and he decides to dye his skin so he appears to be African American and go live in the south to see how he would be treated based solely on his skin. This was a very deep and enlightneing account. It's just hard for me to comprehend that people were so bigoted towards people just because of their skin tone. It honestly makes me really angry that people can be that ignorant and small minded. I found that the FRE was relatively easy to write because the prompt fit perfectly with this book and I felt strongly towards the topic. I am really glad that I had the opportunity to read this book and I would highly recommend it, especially since all of it actually happened!

Apparently there is a movie about "Black Like Me"...I'll have to be sure to watch it!

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0057889/