AP Institute - After

We're in the home stretch... the final afternoon session always seems to be a time when there is a need to do a bit of chatting and goofing around. After four days of intensive AP work, it's a necessity to drain the brain for a moment.

Some good things

• really organized: each packet of information I've been given fits into a specific category. I can tell what it means in relationship to other packets of information.
• useful for classroom: not just a packet of graphic organizers, but rather a description of how it work, what it can be used for and specific examples
• paired works: this is one of the most difficult things for me to find pairs or poems that work with specific works or sections; finding appropriate excerpts.
• video, music and artwork pairings; again, very difficult and time-consuming
• essays to score, calibration; it's hard to teach what the readers are looking for when you aren't sure yourself. My AP Lang. course did this on 9 essays-one for each score. Without doing it a few times, it is really hard to explain the difference between a 6 and a 7 or how to really bump up that 4 to a 6.

I'm really inspired to get to work and get more organized for the coming year. Mostly concerning my AP Language course. After taking this course, I'm really feeling cheated by AP Language experience which was not organized, barely helpful and spent a majority of the time explaining the synthesis question. As a result, I believe that my teaching has focused mostly only synthesis type activities... I'm not so sure it's been totally been to the students' benefit.

I'm really excited to be going home and picking up the baby. This weekend is purported to be very nice on the sunshine front. We already have baby swimsuit and a pool! Summer fun!