January 9

Today in class, we did something special with our journals. After answering today's prompt, we each exchanged our journals with a classmate. We read our partners' journals, and wrote commentary answering four questions:

1. What was your first impression?
2. How was it organized?
3. How was the style/tone/diction?
4. How did the mechanics (spelling, punctuation, capitalization, etc.) work?

Then we read our commentary back to our partner so we could hear how others perceive our writing. I actually thought it was really interesting to hear the commentary — not just on mine, but also on the others that people around the room shared with the class.

The homework tonight is slightly different than what Dr. Preston originally wrote in today's post — first, we need to reread the Siddhartha passage and see if we can find any of the literary terms from this week's list. Next is items 2, 3, and 4 from the post (copy-pasted here for convenience): "Search for AP Literature/Composition questions on Siddhartha and find five multiple choice/essay questions worth asking. What do these questions tell you about the AP exam? What do you need to "see" when you read a passage? In a post titled "AP PREP POST 1: SIDDHARTHA,"

• a) list the five questions you chose and the URLs where you found them;
• b) answer the five questions to the best of your ability (if you listed an interesting question that you can't answer because it's not covered in the passage, explain what information you'd need to do a proper job);
• c) explain what the questions tell you about the skills/content you need to master for the AP exam."

Those are the only two assignments for today (we don't need to worry about the SMART goals until later).