February Course Material

Doesn't it seem weirdly early to be doing this again? We're only halfway through the month...

So we read Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead, did a whole bunch of analyzing, and were informed that we sucked at writing thesis/intro paragraphs. But it's okay, because Ms. Holmes gave us a workshop to hone our skills, and put them to the test the following day.

Maybe an easy place to begin is the intro paragraph boot-camp we did. As of now I have not revised my open prompt's intro, but I plan to do that before they are peer edited and graded and such. I'm glad we did that practice, because I needed some guidance with the essays. I wish we did a little more writing practice in class regarding how to structure the essays. In history themed AP essays it was easy to make a tricolon thesis and there you have your three body paragraphs. Anyone who took AP World especially knows exactly what I'm describing. AP Science essays are just detailed explanations that follow no structure (and therefore, I'm great at those!) but what do I do for lit? I often find that my theses argue one thing, or maybe a two-element idea, but even then how do I fill body paragraphs? Do I argue the same thing from three different angles? Any advice on structure..?

With regard to R and G... My hour has been discussing this idea that Ros and Guil are characters and so their lives are controlled by fate as the author (Shakespeare) wrote it. The Players are outside of Hamlet and see that R and G's lives are fated, believing themselves to be different. But we (audience of real people) are outside of Stoppard's play and see that the Players are also fated by the words that Stoppard wrote for them. So are we free from fate and driving our own boats? Or is there a superior power out there that writes the play we are all trapped in?

One last thing, I was listening to Pandora radio and a song came on that totally sounded like it fit the theme of R and G are Dead and I was so excited that I jerked and the cord to my earbuds pulled taught and my phone was hurled off my bathroom counter, where it shattered into phone, battery, and battery cover all over the tile. Pandora did not save the track history, so the song is lost forever. But believe me, it fit so closely I wonder if the artist based it off of Stoppard's play!

We'll never know.