AP English Language and Composition Summer Project

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1 AP English Language and Composition Summer Project Mrs. Coggburn / coggburc@wcsoh.org / join Remind and Google Classroom for updates & info Dear, I am excited to have you in AP English Language & Composition next year. This course focuses on rhetoric and the underlying, often hidden, meanings of language conveyed in a text. In order to prepare for this course, there is a summer reading project. Please come see me at your earliest convenience to pick up your books before you leave for the summer. Enjoy reading! -Mrs. Coggburn, Room 200 Reading: To keep you engaged in active reading throughout the summer, all students will read two books one common title and one Book Circle choice book. All of the books are award winning pieces of nonfiction that are well worth the time. The choice books were selected for their varied topics for varied preferences. Please be aware that all the books may contain events, language, and/or themes intended for mature readers. I suggest you talk to other readers friends and family, teachers and librarians about titles they would recommend for you. Read the brief descriptions provided on the next page and make your choice based on your interests, beliefs, and values. Common Reading: The Devil in the White City by Erik Larson Book Circle choices: Guns, Germs, and Steel by Jared Diamond The Man Who Mistook his Wife for a Hat by Oliver Sacks The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks by Rebecca Skloot The Glass Castle by Jeannette Walls The World WIthout Us by Alan Weisman Directions for Reading: Active reading is a skill you will use throughout your life, not just school. While reading each book, please annotate (mark the text in some way highlight, underline, circle, make marginal notes, use post-it notes) the following concepts: The author s use of figurative language (simile, metaphor, personification, imagery, etc.) The author s attempts to be credible, knowledgeable, ethical on the subject matter (ethos) The author s attempts to use logic, reasoning to convince or persuade the reader (logos) The author s attempts to appeal to the reader s emotions (pity, pride, patriotism) in order to convince or persuade the reader (pathos). Journaling: Part of active reading includes reflection and response. As you read you will be annotating many passages in the texts. Journaling is a formal way of engaging in a conversation with these texts. The journal entries are a demonstration of your responses to the passages you have marked.

2 You do not have to respond to ALL of your annotations, but you should definitely highlight the key passages you have identified in your reading. Directions for Journaling: The term Dialectic means the art or practice of arriving at the truth by using conversation involving question and answer. I am including a Dialectical Journal template that you may use. You may choose to use other types of dialectical journals (Double-Entry, Quote and Note, Observe and React, etc.), just be sure they include space for the text, page #, and space for your response. Requirements: 10 or more total entries for each book. Each quote entry is at least 1 complete sentence. Quotation entries are from the entire book (beginning, middle, and end). All response entries have 2 or more complete sentences and demonstrate fully developed thoughts or connections about the text. Join my Remind group and Google Classroom. Using Remind, I will send a few reminders over the summer to keep you focused and informed. It s also a great way to ask me questions as you progress through this project. In my Google Classroom I will have available this assignment as well as the Dialectical Journal Template. You may submit your journals to the Classroom as you finish them or turn them in on the first day of class. Note: You do not have to complete your journals electronically, but you can if that works for you. To join Remind by to 8101 To join Remind online: To join my Google Classroom: code i4v38i Please bring both books and your journal entries to class on the first day. I will do a book check on both titles and collect your journals (if you have not already submitted them electronically) on the first day of school. You will receive grades for both annotations and journal entries. We will be jumping into lessons involving each of the books right away, so it is in your best interest to use your time this summer to read, annotate and respond to (via journaling) the texts while you have time. Your first writing assignment on these titles will be given in the first week of school. This may include quizzes, tests, and/or essays.

3 Below are brief descriptions of the books we will be reading this summer. Read each description and carefully consider the choice you make for your Book Circle option. When you have decided, please come see me in room 200 to pick up your books before leaving for the summer. There are a limited number of each of the choice books na they will be distributed on a first-come first-served basis. (So if there is one you REALLY want to read, get to me soon!) Common title: The Devil in the White City by Erik Larson Author Erik Larson imbues the incredible events surrounding the 1893 Chicago World's Fair with such drama that readers may find themselves checking the book's categorization to be sure that 'The Devil in the White City' is not, in fact, a highly imaginative novel. Larson tells the stories of two men: Daniel H. Burnham, the architect responsible for the fair's construction, and H.H. Holmes, a serial killer masquerading as a charming doctor. Burnham's challenge was immense. In a short period of time, he was forced to overcome the death of his partner and numerous other obstacles to construct the famous "White City" around which the fair was built. His efforts to complete the project, and the fair's incredible success, are skillfully related along with entertaining appearances by such notables as Buffalo Bill Cody, Susan B. Anthony, Nikola Tesla and Thomas Edison. The activities of the sinister Dr. Holmes, who is believed to be responsible for scores of murders around the time of the fair, are equally remarkable. He devised and erected the World's Fair Hotel, complete with crematorium and gas chamber, near the fairgrounds and used the event as well as his own charismatic personality to lure victims (Goodreads.com). Book Circle Choices Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies by Jared Diamond In this "artful, informative, and delightful" (William H. McNeill, New York Review of Books) book, Jared Diamond convincingly argues that geographical and environmental factors shaped the modern world. Societies that had had a head start in food production advanced beyond the hunter- gatherer stage, and then developed religion as well as nasty germs and potent weapons of war and adventured on sea and land to conquer and decimate preliterate cultures. A major advance in our understanding of human societies, Guns, Germs, and Steel chronicles the way that the modern world came to be and stunningly dismantles racially based theories of human history. Winner of the Pulitzer Prize, the Phi Beta Kappa Award in Science, the Rhone-Poulenc Prize, and the Commonwealth club of California's Gold Medal (Barnes & Noble.com). The Man Who Mistook his Wife for a Hat by Oliver Sacks In his most extraordinary book, one of the great clinical writers of the twentieth century (The New York Times) recounts the case histories of patients lost in the bizarre, apparently inescapable world of neurological disorders. Oliver Sacks s The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat tells the stories of individuals afflicted with fantastic perceptual and intellectual aberrations: patients who have lost their memories and with them the greater part of their pasts; who are no longer able to recognize people and common objects; who are stricken with violent tics and grimaces or who shout involuntary obscenities; whose limbs have become alien; who have been dismissed as retarded yet are gifted with uncanny artistic or mathematical talents. If inconceivably strange, these brilliant tales remain, in Dr. Sacks s splendid and sympathetic telling, deeply human. They are studies of life struggling against incredible adversity, and they enable us to enter the

4 world of the neurologically impaired, to imagine with our hearts what it must be to live and feel as they do. A great healer, Sacks never loses sight of medicine s ultimate responsibility: the suffering, afflicted, fighting human subject (Barnes & Noble.com). The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks by Rebecca Skloot Henrietta Lacks, as HeLa, is known to present-day scientists for her cells from cervical cancer. She was a poor Southern tobacco farmer who worked the same land as her slave ancestors, yet her cells were taken without her knowledge and still live decades after her death. Cells descended from her may weigh more than 50M metric tons. HeLa cells were vital for developing the polio vaccine; uncovered secrets of cancer, viruses, and the atom bomb s effects; helped lead to important advances like in vitro fertilization, cloning, and gene mapping; and have been bought and sold by the billions. Yet Henrietta Lacks was buried in an unmarked grave. The journey starts in the colored ward of Johns Hopkins Hospital in the 1950s, her small, dying hometown of Clover, Virginia wooden slave quarters, faith healings, and voodoo. Today are stark white laboratories with freezers full of HeLa cells, East Baltimore children and grandchildren live in obscurity, see no profits, and feel violated. The dark history of experimentation on African Americans helped lead to the birth of bioethics, and legal battles over whether we control the stuff we are made of (Goodreads.com). The Glass Castle by Jeannette Walls The Glass Castle is a remarkable memoir of resilience and redemption, and a revelatory look into a family at once deeply dysfunctional and uniquely vibrant. When sober, Jeannette's brilliant and charismatic father captured his children's imagination, teaching them physics, geology, and how to embrace life fearlessly. But when he drank, he was dishonest and destructive. Her mother was a free spirit who abhorred the idea of domesticity and didn't want the responsibility of raising a family. The Walls children learned to take care of themselves. They fed, clothed, and protected one another, and eventually found their way to New York. Their parents followed them, choosing to be homeless even as their children prospered. The Glass Castle is truly astonishing--a memoir permeated by the intense love of a peculiar but loyal family (Goodreads.com). The World WIthout Us by Alan Weisman In The World Without Us, Alan Weisman offers an utterly original approach to questions of humanity's impact on the planet: he asks us to envision our Earth, without us. In this far-reaching narrative, Weisman explains how our massive infrastructure would collapse and finally vanish without human presence; which everyday items may become immortalized as fossils; how copper pipes and wiring would be crushed into mere seams of reddish rock; why some of our earliest buildings might be the last architecture left; and how plastic, bronze sculpture, radio waves, and some man-made molecules may be our most lasting gifts to the universe. From places already devoid of humans (a last fragment of primeval European forest; the Korean DMZ; Chernobyl), Weisman reveals Earth's tremendous capacity for self-healing. As he shows which human devastations are indelible, and which examples of our highest art and culture would endure longest, Weisman's narrative ultimately drives toward a radical but persuasive solution that needn't depend on our demise. It is narrative nonfiction at its finest, and in posing an irresistible concept with both gravity and a highly readable touch, it looks deeply at our effects on the planet in a way that no other book has (Goodreads.com).

5 Dialectical Journal Quotation from the Text Page Response

6 Dialectical Journal Quotation from the Text Page Response

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