Has a great book ever transported you to a new place? My students are looking for texts that will excite and enrich them, while also teaching them about the world outside of NYC.
My students are seniors preparing for college in an intensive Advanced Placement Literature course.
In our opening weeks of school, many of the students expressed a desire to read captivating books that will not only get them ready for the college classroom, but also reinvigorate their interest in reading. I teach at a magnet school for the arts in NY. My students are twelfth graders from a variety of backgrounds in regard to socioeconomic status, ethnicity, and reading interest. They have all decided to take the most challenging English course we have to offer and are approaching the class with determination and drive.
My Project
This May, my senior students will be taking the Advanced Placement Literature exam. In order to best prepare for the exam, they need to read literature from a range of writers. Our course is a comprehensive look at modern and classic canonical texts from British, American, and World authors. While our school has texts to cover most of these areas, we could benefit from texts considered world drama and modern American fiction. As a result, Athol Fugard's microcosm of South African apartheid and Jhumpa Lahiri's Pulitzer prize-winning collection of short stories would be incredible additions to our reading list. I can already picture my students diving into these two works, analyzing symbols and reveling in the beautiful language. Not only will these texts help prepare the students for the exam, they will also provide students with opportunities to love reading. Isn't that what we dream for high school students?
The past two weeks, I have been amazed by my AP students' enthusiasm and willingness to grapple with difficult literary texts.
Fugard and Lahiri's texts could help to keep this energy and also best prepare the students for the AP exam.
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