AP English Literature and Composition Distance Learning Packet 2
Hopefully you and your family are doing well. As you have likely heard by now, the AP Literature and Composition exam will be entirely FRQ based. We’re still waiting to hear how many and what type of FRQs will be required. We will send details to you as soon as they become available. You should also look for updates on.
**Remember that you must login to your teacher’s online platform so that you can be updated about course and exam changes regularly. We are not able to keep you updated with printed paper. You should be reviewing your teacher’s online platform daily. This is absolutely essential.
To continue preparing, you should complete the following:
- Contact your teacher and get settled into the online platform he/she is using. Cline is using Remind. Dr. George is using Office 365
- Go to the AP YouTube channel and watch all exam review webinars that are available for this course. Changes are being made to the exam, and these reviews are going to be essential to your success. You should go directly to YouTube and search for Advanced Placement. Then search within the channel for Literature and Composition, or browse through all of the videos.
- Finish reading your novel, and complete your FRQ3 from Distance Learning 1. You should type your FRQ and either share it as a Word document through Office 365 or send it via email attachment as a PDF file. Continue to communicate with Mr. Cline or Dr. George if you are having any difficulties.
- Complete FRQ 7 on the AP Classroom Platform.
- If you have extra time, KEEP READING. Select another novel of appropriate merit, and read, read, read.
Standards/Skills:
Figurative Language 6.A: Identify and explain the function of a simile.
Figurative Language 6.C: Identify and explain the function of personification.
Literary Argumentation 7.A: Develop a paragraph comprised of 1) a claim that requires defense with evidence from the text, and 2) the evidence itself.
Literary Argumentation 7.B: Develop a thesis statement that conveys a defensible claim about an interpretation of literature and that may establish a line of reasoning.
Literary Argumentation 7.C: Develop commentary that establishes and explains relationships among textual evidence, the line of reasoning, and the claim.
Literary Argumentation 7.D: Select and use relevant and sufficient evidence to both develop and support a line of reasoning.
Literary Argumentation 7.E: Demonstrate control over the elements of composition to communicate clearly.
FRQ 7
The following excerpt is from “Bread and the Land” by Jeffery Renard Allen, published in 2008. In this passage, a young boy, Hatch, confronts his grandmother, Blunt. Blunt has recently moved to town and has met Hatch for the first time. Read the passage carefully. Then, in a well-written essay, analyze how Allen uses and techniques to convey what Hatch’s interactions with other characters reveal about him.
In your response you should do the following:
- Respond to the prompt with a thesis that presents an interpretation and may establish a line of reasoning.
- Select and use evidence to develop and support your line of reasoning.
- Explain the relationship between the evidence and your thesis.
- Use appropriate grammar and punctuation in communicating your argument.
Where’s Blunt?
Plumed exhaust rose from the idling cab.
She hasn’t returned. Mamma spoke from the dark cavelike inside.
She was sposed to pick me up.
Mamma blinked nervously. Did she say that?
No.
Well.
I thought she was gon pick me up.
Watch your mouth. Those kids at this school are a bad influence.
She was sposed to pick me up.
Get in this cab.
How come we can’t take the train? He spoke to the moving window, the moving world.
We have no reason to take the train.
I’m being frank.
Please be quiet.
He obliged. Quiet and caught, the living moment before him and behind. He tried to imagine Blunt’s face and received the taste of steel on his tongue. He let his violence fly free like the soaring El cars above, a flock of steel birds rising out of a dark tunnel, into bright air, the city shrinking below.
The cab slowed and felled his desires. Slim currents of traffic congealed into a thick pool up ahead. The taxi advanced an inch or two every few minutes. The El’s skeletal structure rose several stories above them. An occasional train rumbled by and shook the cab and mocked his frail yearning. He looked out the window to vent his anger. A good ways off he could discern a woman standing in a building doorway, a guitar strapped to her body and a coffee can at her gym-shoed feet. Coatless, in a checkered cotton dress, her bare muscular legs as firm as the El’s pylons in the bitter cold. She kept rhythm with one foot, while some lensed smiling face rose or fell with each stroke of the guitar.
He shouldered the cab door open and started through the street, his boots breaking through snow at each step, and traffic so thick he had to squeeze between the cars. Wind tried to push him back, and the fat snowsuit wedged between two parked cars. But he freed himself from the moment and thought of his mother and thought of his father and thought of the preacher and thought of Blunt and fancy clothes and contact lenses and lahzonyah and smiles and promises.
Hatch! Mamma shouted after him, her voice distant, weak, deformed, small, dwarfish, alien. Intent on his target, he moved like a tank in his armored snowsuit, smooth heavy unstoppable anger. Close now. Blunt framed in the doorway, his face trained on her guitar. Her hair was not long and flowing and silver but knotted in a colorless bun. Her eyes were not green or blue or brown or gray but a dull black. She shut them. Aimed her pug nose, arrowlike, at the El platform. Snapped open her mouth.
Baby, baby, take off this heavy load
