My students need 35 copies of The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao and Wide Sargasso Sea as well as 8 copies of Retaliation to keep our AP Literature class alive.
This project is a part of the Hispanic & Latinx Heritage Month celebration because
it supports a Latino teacher or a school where the majority of students are Latino.
My Students
Advanced Juniors and Seniors at our struggling urban school are desperate for AP curriculum that has no support from our school budget. We need access to quality literature to create a class despite the crunch!
Our students are advanced Juniors and Seniors who have decided to commit to a before-school AP Literature class.
They love literature, writing, and have taken it upon themselves to be role models for the lower grades. They are representative of our school as a whole--about one third are English Language Learners, and nearly all qualify for free or reduced lunch.
Our students want to think critically. They want to push themselves to read difficult texts and write complex analysis. They want to be competitive candidates for college, despite attending school in a district with notorious funding problems.
These AP students have amazed us with their dedication and drive.
My Project
This project involves securing the texts for all students in the AP Literature Course for three units throughout the year (about half of the books students will read over the year). As a class, we will read the Pulitzer Prize-winning novel, The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao by Junot Diaz. In this unit, students will write essays about fragmented narrative, the function of dialect in literature, and criticize literature through various lenses. Later in the year, as part of our study of Jane Eyre, students will read Wide Sargasso Sea by Jean Rhys.
By comparing these two texts, students will be practicing college-level analysis, and writing extended drafts of advanced essays. Finally, Retaliation by Yasmin Shiraz will be one of the books that makes up a unit of high-interest novels for students to read independently.
All of these novels will make AP literature come to life in a way that textbooks and photocopies cannot.
Our students need books to carry from home to school, to read on the bus, and to annotate for our class seminar discussions. In part because of the cost of such texts, AP Literature is still under the knife at our school. Providing students with this quality literature will help not only our AP students now and in the future, but help to make sure the class continues at all.
Nearly all students from low‑income households
Data about students' economic need comes from the National Center for Education Statistics, via our partners at MDR Education. Learn more
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As a teacher-founded nonprofit, we're trusted by thousands of teachers and supporters across the country. This classroom request for funding was created by Ms. Sheffer and reviewed by the DonorsChoose team.
