Post #17: FINAL REFLECTION

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AP LIT EXAM

I felt very well prepared to take the AP Literature exam, and I believe that I performed very well on it. I think the biggest reason for my success was my reason to identify universal themes and center my writing around these themes. Especially on the Open Question, when you are potentially flooded by all the options to write about, I was able to quickly identify the universal theme and think through which novel I believed connected the best to this theme, which I believe made a much stronger, more focused essay. My biggest struggle has always been the multiple choice, mainly because of time but also because I struggle to gain the correct meaning from a quick reading, a fact that was also slightly detrimental to me on the Prose and Poetry essays. However, during the school year, with all of the practice we did, I greatly improved in articulating a complexity and identifying character traits that were much more complex and indicative of deep thinking that helped improve the quality of my analysis and synthesis of thoughts.

FINAL INDEPENDENT TED TALK

The objective of our final project was to create an 11-12 minute TED talk that analyzed the process that we all go through to find our place in the world.

The independent novel I choose to complete this assignment was The Kite Runner by Khaled Hosseini, where I explored the idea of how guilt and betrayal defined our identities and influenced our actions. Throughout this project, I believe that I was able to provide a complete, well-reasoned analysis that allowed me to put together a very cohesive TED talk that effortlessly combined the viewpoints I presented in all 3 of my essays. The passage and poem I selected centered around the universal theme of the novel and provided more evidence for the truth that Hosseini strived to acknowledge through his novel, which helped me center my focus when writing all 3 essays and address one central theme that I could then synthesize together to provide a combined argument from 3 viewpoints. Because of this central focus that I kept, I felt I was able to put together a very smooth presentation very naturally without too much unnatural effort.

Throughout the year, because we had often used one anchor prompt with related supporting prompts for every book we read, I developed a habit of looking for connections between universal themes, and as I did, I improved my writing by focusing it on a more central idea or a universal theme and exploring all the different perspectives and ideas that can be followed from it. The skill to make connections and identify universal themes helped me on the AP Exam to organize my writing much more, as I could quickly identify one universal theme in a poem, a passage, or a prompt and connect it to the work I choose to write about.

However, if I were to do this again, I would focus more attention towards connecting the elements of the TED talk and making stronger connections to the present day, as well as adding more personal appeals to the audience, because I believe that The Kite Runner teaches lessons that are valuable for everyone to connect to on a personal level, and I should have developed more of that pathos in my presentation.

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