AF: Dear Class of 2016 (Revised)

NOW IS A GOOD TIME TO START.  

If you review the particulars of the assignment, you will see that anyone who does all of their blogging in one week is penalized by 50% since it subverts the meaning and the purpose of blogging.

But there's a lot of space between 100% and 50%.  I do not appreciate your waiting until the last two or three weeks of August to begin the work.  We are only four weeks out.  The potential for an A on this part of the assignment is slipping away...I mean, I read the blog and evaluate the quality of thinking and writing, but I am also just looking for straight up participation.

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I’d like to remind everyone that the assignment is not to like (or dislike) the assigned books, or to be entertained (or bored) by the books, but to comprehend what the authors are saying. When I see the phrase, "what the author is trying to say...",  I will sometimes point out that the author IS actually saying something; thousands of people have engaged with it, the work has been peer reviewed, and it's the READER who is trying to figure it out.  Your boredom is not the fault of the writer.  That disengagement resides within the reader.  As your teacher, what I want to know is whether you can understand and work with what they are saying. There is a place for personal experience in argument, but personal experience is not enough. What I am looking for is analysis, evidence, engagement with the ideas at hand.

To those who are having issues with vocabulary: I strongly encourage looking up the meaning of the words you do not know. Learning new words and incorporating them into your repertoire will help you throughout your year in AP 11 and the rest of your life. Diverse language is a virtue in all academic fields.

I hope to see more thoughtful blog posts in the very near future. It’s the end of July. Time to get it together. Again, thank you to the people who have participated; obviously, I am not talking to you.