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Dear Mrs. Mick,
In this assignment, you will find a compilation of assignments I did throughout this year and last year, there is essays and other projects I made. You will find assignments in different units, like poetry, satire, making annotations and much more. You will also  find my theme, my metaphor and my reflections.
Throughout the years, I have had some struggles with the essays and the multiple choice. I always scored low on them, but by the end of each year, I knew how to tell what the prompts were asking for, so I was able to get slightly higher scores since I understood more. I also did really well in some units like Satire and free response essays. I was able to analyze the books we read very easily and make annotations. These are some of the struggles and some of the victories I had this year.
My favorite things from the year was the satire unit and projects and the symbolism project. I liked those because they were interesting to me and I was able to understand them very easily. I got to be as creative as I could, which I really liked. My least favorite things were the tests over anything because it was always hard for me to understand what I was reading and what the questions and prompts were asking. I always interpreted the questions differently than how I should have, so I always struggled with them. Throughout the year, I have got better at the tests but I still do not like them. These are some of my strengths and weaknesses of the year.
I hope you enjoy this final project for AP Lit.
Sincerely,
Makenzie Couch

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My words are chains of lead.

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Taking college level classes in high school take a lot of work. It is not something you can cram into one night, you have to take your time.

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" “I also like to drive under the influence of other substances, I focus better and I pay way more attention to the road.”

When they asked Mr. Delanto what other substances he used while he drove, he stated he used drugs while  he drove.

“I mean, I don't necessarily smoke while I drive, but if I’m about to leave for a stressful meeting or I know I am about to do a tough task, I smoke a little or drink before I leave. Just enough for a little buzz to help me focus while I’m driving.”

Mr. Delanto is someone we can all look up to, he hasn’t gotten into a single accident while driving under the influence, so it can't be too hard to do. "

This is from the satire unit, which was my favorite. This unit helped me to improve my writing ability because I got to use a lot of dialogue and sarcasm.

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What do I love about you?

Could it be the face that you make me smile?

Could it be that you love me too,

That you always go the extra mile?

Not even my favorite book do I love like I do you

The suspenseful turn of all the pages

I love you more than I do the zoo

And all those animals in their cages.

But books end and animals pass

My love for you will be eternal

Something like a giant landmass

What we have is really quite vernal.

A love that feels like a new spring day

I know that you will always make a way.

This was recent, the sonnet we had to write. I enjoyed writing this because I could choose to write about whatever I wanted. This assignment expanded my vocabulary, I learned what 'Vernal' meant. It also helped me rhyme better, it helped me to be able to come up with rhymes easier.

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"The water was covering our laps in the car now, and since I  knew neither of us wanted to drown in the car I took the headrest off the back of my seat and told Mia to do the same. We broke the windows and swam out. We both got swept up by the current and I saw Mia go under. I kept swimming in hopes of finding something to hold on to, but I had little effort. My mind was racing with thoughts about how death is uncontrollable and sometimes sudden. In my last few minutes I cried over the loss of my father and the loss of Mia. It was hard to tell that I was crying just by looking at me. You couldn't tell if it was tears or water. But God knew. He knew that I knew it was my time and there was no way around it. I kept swimming but it was useless. I saw a piece of paper floating towards me and I almost let it go, but I felt something pulling me towards it. The last thing I saw before I was swept under was: “It’s short for Michael. I love you.” '

This is an excerpt of the short story I wrote for the symbolism unit. This writing helped me to not only write what I felt like writing, but also to improve my creativity. This was fun for me to write.

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This padlet was used to make annotations for 1984. This was the first Padlet I used and it helped me to not only know of a website to use for presentations, but also it helped me to understand how to annotate things at a higher level.

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I plan to go to college and I will have to take an english course, but after that, I probably wont use writing very much except for short story ideas I have because it is not something I see fitting into my everyday life. The only writing I will have to do after I am done with school is report writing, which is very formal and not for fun. As far as reading goes, I mostly will read because that is something I like doing. I will use reading analysis to help make decisions like how to cook something or how to set something up and I think it is a good skill to have because if I didn't know how to comprehend what I read I would live a very hard life and make a lot of mistakes.

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Assignments Preparing Me For The AP Test

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Assignments Preparing Me For The AP Test

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I am not taking the AP test, but the essays that we got to write helped me a lot because it challenged me to write from a viewpoint that I maybe didn't agree with. The multiple choice helped a little as well because it showed me what the people grading the test would look for in their answers and it showed me that you have to read deeper than just what the words say, you have to understand what they mean.

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I have taken AP Lit and Lang. Both courses have helped me to understand what I am reading, they both have helped me comprehend reading at a higher level.
An excerpt of an essay I wrote last year in AP Lang is: "This example from Source B talks about what it is like to be more ‘free willed’- earlier in the passage it talks about the arts- music, art, stuff like that and for those specific things, while it is beneficial to go to college for them, you should not definitely have to. To be a music major it takes at least 4 years of college, which is great if you are passionate about music and if you have the money to pay for college and everything else you will need until you find a career in music that suits you. If you are not so passionate, however, spending the money and waiting for the outcome can be challenging. It is not easy to have your parent telling you that by being an art major you won’t amount to much because everyone wants to be an artist and it's hard to do that job and have good results." This was a DBQ type essay, with sources that we had to use.

An excerpt of something I wrote this year in AP Lit is: " “...Good Sense clear plastic bump stocks, RitePrice high- capacity magazines, and the entire Essential Product line of disposable flash suppressors.” Again, the author is poking fun at society for making those items easy to obtain. You could go to a small town gun shop and get all of that for $100, without being carded. With all the violence going on today, before the Florida shooting, you shouldn't have been able to get a gun or ammunition so easy, but you could. Now, in the state of Missouri, you don't even have to wait the 3 day period after you purchase your gun for the company to run a background check on you." This is a satirical essay on gun control.

Both essays have different topics but both show something we spent a lot of time on in each class. For AP Lang we spent most of our time writing free response essays and doing things like DBQ's while in AP Lit we spent a very large part of our time on Satire. Of the two, I preferred satire because it was more of something you could make your own, like we did with presentations we could make the project however we wanted, but with the free responses, we had to mention certain things in order to get points which was a lot harder.

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A piece of literature that has impacted me the most this year is 'Their Eyes Were Watching God' because I learned about what it was like for colored people right after slavery ended, I learned what it was like for women, and I learned that death is everywhere. An excerpt that I did my close reads over is this: "Mrs. Turner, like ail other believers had built an altar to the

unattainable— Caucasian characteristics for all. Her god would

smite her, would hurl her from pinnacles and lose her in deserts,

but she would not forsake his altars. Behind her crude words was a

belief that somehow she and others through worship could attain

her paradise — a heaven of straighthaired, thin-lipped, high-nose

boned white seraphs. The physical impossibilities in no way injured

feith. That was the mystery and mysteries are the chores of gods.

Beyond her faith was a fanaticism to defend the altars of her god.

It was distressing to emerge from her inner temple and find these

black desccrators howling with laughter before the door. Oh, for

an army, terrible with banners and swords!

So she didn't cling to Janie Woods the woman. She paid

homage to Janie's Caucasian characteristics as such. And when

she was with Janie she had a feeling of transmutation, as if she

herself had become whiter and with straighter hair and she hated

Tea Cake first for his defilement of divinity and next for his telling

mockery of her. If she only knew something she could do about

it! But she didn't. Once she was complaining about the carry-

ings-on at the jook and Tea Cake snapped, "Aw, don't make God

look so foolish — findin* fault wid everything He made." ' (Hurston, 145)

With the close reads, I made an analysis of why I chose the devices I chose, and they are exaggeration, foil, pathos, and nostalgia. This piece impacted me a lot because it helped me come to terms with something I constantly struggled with which was that death is unavoidable. In my life, I always worry about my loved ones and death and this story kind of helped me be a little more rational about it.

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-It relates to my theme because it was a very hard read with how the characters spoke in slang and older talk, but the story itself was easy to read. It shows that an AP class is very hard to take and not something that you can just try to read in one sitting. It took me over the two weeks you gave us to read because I kept finding other things to do instead of read.
-It impacted me because it really showed me all the inequalities there used to be. It showed the time after slavery and how women were treated. It really opened my eyes to something I didn't realize happened to that extent. Also, like I said above, it helped me kind of accept how life works.
-This again, opened my eyes to something I wasn't aware of, and it has expanded my reading genre. I usually wouldn't read anything like that, but once I got into it and started reading it, I liked it. I would probably read this again, even though it's not something I would have picked for myself.
-I would tell the next group that reads it that it gets better, once you get about 70 pages in, it gets really interesting and it is something I highly recommend.
-I would suggest Jane Eyre because I have read a lot of reviews about it and summaries about it and it is something I think I would like to read. It seems interesting to me. I came across the book at the beginning of the year when we were in the vortex working on poetry and the big book you gave us talked about it and I thought it sounded interesting. I would like to read it.

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If you push yourself you will achieve great things. In my book, The Wrong Girl by C.J. Archer, the main character Hannah Smith gets kidnapped and pushes herself to do something and achieves it, so when you push yourself you can achieve anything.

In The Wrong Girl, Hannah Smith starts out locked in the attic of an earl. Hannah is locked there with her friend, Violet Jameson, who is the daughter of Lord Wade. For 16 years, Hannah was locked in the attic, until she got kidnapped by the gardener there, Jack Langley. Up until the point where Hannah got kidnapped, she believed that Violet could start fires with her mind. Hannah was narcoleptic and when she got angry she would fall asleep. While she lived in the attic, she would get angry with the teachers the Lord hired and she would fall asleep. Whenever Hannah woke up from the episodes, whatever room she was in would be wet, and if it didn't have wool in it, burning or covered in scorch marks. Hannah believed Violet started the fires with her mind, and Hannah believed that Violets ‘trigger’ was when Hannah fell asleep, Violet got scared and started the fires. “I was, after all, a prisoner, a narcoleptic and a companion to a lady who started fires with her mind.” (p.10) In this part, Hannah is talking about how she did not get greeted by a footman at her mansion, because Hannah is not the daughter of Lord Wade, Violet is.

Later in the book, Hannah, Violet, and one of their teachers were taking a walk before it turned to winter. It was pretty late, just before the sun set, and they took a route through the woods. It started pouring rain, and so the girls all ran for shelter- they knew there was a gardener shed a ways back in the woods. Hannah and Violet got there, but when they turned to talk to their teacher, they realized she was not with them. The girls stayed in the shed for a little while to wait out the storm, but when it had been going for a while and showed no sign of letting up, Hannah got restless. They heard something outside and Hannah thought it was the gardener so she went outside to tell him why they were there, but when she got outside, no one was there. “Someone grabbed me from behind. A hand holding a cloth clamped over my nose and mouth. A sweet smell swamped me and clung to the back of my throat.” (p.15) This happened when someone kidnapped Hannah, thinking it was Violet. When Hannah woke up after the effects of whatever knocked her out wore off, she was in a carriage with some lady she had never seen, and the gardner. They took her to a place called Windamere Manor.

While Hannah was at the manor, the Freak House, as they call it, she tried to escape. Hannah ran off into the woods, but she got caught. After she got caught, she had to go talk to the owner of the Freakhouse. During their conversation he told Hannah that she would only have to stay there until Christmas, as long as she didn't try to run away again. Hannah agreed to stay and not try to run away. During her stay at the Freakhouse, Hannah had training to start fires with her mind because that is the reason she got kidnapped. Hannah, upon arrival, thought  she couldn’t do it, that it was Violet that was the fire starter. Hannah tried for weeks and weeks, but she couldn't do it. One day, she was talking to the man that kidnapped her, and he made her mad. More mad than she had ever been, and she thought she would pass out, since she is narcoleptic. Hannah forced herself to stay awake because she did not want the man that kidnapped her to think she was weak. Despite how much Hannah tried, she just didn’t think she could stay awake, until she noticed sparks flying from her fingers. She didn't think they were hers, she thought the sparks were Jacks, since he was the only other known fire starter in the world, but she realized they were hers.

During Hannah’s journey, she learned that if you push yourself, you can achieve great things. Hannah achieved not only staying awake when she would normally fall asleep, but also that she could start fires with her mind. When you push yourself or are pushed by others, you can achieve almost anything.

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-It relates to my guiding principle because I did not do the summer reading and I had to write an essay over a book off of the summer reading list. I did not get the list because I wasn't planning on being in the class. It shows that AP courses are a lot harder than they seem because I didn't do the reading and so it was very hard for me to complete the essay.
-It kind of shows that I am optimistic. In the last paragraph I say "...She learned that if you push yourself, you can achieve great things." Normally, if I was faced with any kind of challenge like Hannah was, I would give up but the book showed perseverance, which I think is a good quality to have and I would like to be more like that. This essay also shows I did not do any good reading or writing over the summer, but it is fine because I still did read and write over the summer, just not off of the reading list I was supposed to use.
-If you look at this essay and you look at the last thing I wrote, which was the sonnet, you notice that I have refined my writing style a lot. I am using bigger words and I have better grammar, I also write more sophisticated than I did at the beginning of the year.

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In the Series: A Series of Unfortunate Events, a family with three children loses their parents in a house fire. The children then get moved around with different relatives. Each book is a different relative in a different location, but they all have one thing in common- their uncle, Count Olaf, follows them wherever they go to find them and kills each of their relatives so the children can live with him and he can inherit all the money their parents left to them. Each book takes place in completely different parts of the world, so it is ridiculous that the uncle is able to find them wherever they go. Each kid has a specific skill set, the oldest is very mechanically smart, she can build all kinds of things. The middle is a very fast, avid reader. He has a bunch of knowledge that can help them all. The youngest has very sharp teeth that she uses to bite people when they are threatening the children. The experience of the children is kind of traumatic. They lost their parents and then they have a serial killer uncle who only wants them to live with him because he wants to be in control of all the money the parents left to them. Because of their uncle, the kids witness very tragic things, not only their own parents burning alive, but relatives freezing to death, or drowning, or being accused of committing suicide when it was obviously murder. Throughout all the books, the children learn things about themselves and the world like the fact that when they work together they can accomplish a lot of different things and get themselves out of very serious situations. They can work together to overcome many obstacles in their life. The children also learn in society that people are evil and they do evil evil things to other people that no one should have to witness. The experiences the children get helps to illuminate the whole series because it shows that when you have faith and trust in people, you can accomplish many things. Clearly, the kids have gone through more things than most people their age, and they have seen more than anyone should in a lifetime. The children were about 12 years old when their parents died, and while that was an accident, everything else they witnessed in the years that followed was purely on purpose. The uncle eluded police for years, which sends the message to kids in real life that that kind of thing is ok, that killing people is ok, which it is not. Towards the end of the series, the kids kind of stop getting scared whenever the uncle would kill someone because they got so used to seeing it that it didn't affect them anymore. Through seeing all that, the kids got a lot stronger, and that particular part of the series reminds me of a different book I read called The Cellar. That is about a 16 year old girl who gets kidnapped and raped by a man with OCD. The man wanted a ‘perfect’ family, kind of like Count Olaf, so he would kidnap girls and keep them captive in their cellar. At first, the new girl wants to get out, but when she sees her captor kill another girl for being a prostitute, all hopes of her getting out are dashed. She only wants to survive. The two compare because while the 3 children stop getting sad or scared whenever their uncle kills someone, the girls trapped in the cellar stop getting scared when their captor kills another prostitute. They clean up the blood and put the body in a bodybag for him. Both have characters who just accept that what they are going through is their fate and they have to deal with the baggage of it for the rest of their life. Both works have characters who use their terrible situations to become better people and overcome smaller challenges in life because of what they had to go through to get where they are now.

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-It relates to my guiding principle because the prompt for this essay was to pick a novel you read over the course of the year and write about it. I did not read any novels on the list this year, and so this is what I chose. I did not do my work during the year and so it was hard for me to do this essay.
- This shows that I, as a writer, read a lot of books, just not classics. I could write the essay by the prompt, just not from the list of books, I did not prepare like I needed to, so it shows that I am bad at preparing, but good at writing. I read enough books to be able to complete the essay but it was hard for me to think of things. This essay was at the end of the year where I was tired of writing and school so as a writer only giving a little of my effort for the project, I did well.
-If I could have wrote the essay according to the prompt, I believe it would have shown a lot of growth. I knew what the prompt was asking and I was able to show what the prompt was wanting. It still shows that over the course of the two years I was in an AP class that I have got a lot better at writing. At the beginning of last year if I was asked to write the same essay I would not have been able to because I would not have understood what was being asked and so the essay would not have made sense.

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This article covers a serious topic, war, and puts satire into the topic. The article also covers church and prayer, which tie in. The author knows the reality of what war is like, and by introducing the man who shares wisdom, is showing the community what the war is really going to be like for his country to win.

It seems kind of grotesque in the beginning when they are all jubilant because they are about to go to war. There is celebrations for the soldiers and the whole place is buzzing with excitement. If the townspeople knew the horror that war came with, they didn't show it, they were gladly sending them off to fight. “It was indeed a glad and gracious time” That is grotesque and also an incongruity because they are happy to send them to war, and while war might not be going on in their country, some of them still should have had the feeling of being scared that their loved ones might not come home from the war. There is another incongruity when it says “...Envied by the neighbors and friends who had no sons and brothers to send forth into the field of honor.” This is an incongruity because sure, the people might want to be known and even be proud of the men in their family, but by sending them to war, they are risking someone else’s life for a little pride, that they could get by having their son or brother do something else. War is inevitable, and all men at the age of 18 were drafted into it, but people should have been terrified that the war was going to come to their country or that their loved one would die.

The author’s feelings toward war is that while yes, it is something terrible, the community can come together about it. He writes about a church, where the priest is praying for the people, and he uses imagery when he describes the priest as wearing a “Robe that reached to his feet, his head bear, his white hair descending in a frothy cataract to his shoulders.” He is describing the priest in a typical priest way, for the time period. Now, only Catholic priests look like that very often. Later on in the piece, the author uses a surprise, because during the service a man walked in and stated he “Came from the throne-- bearing a message from the Almighty God.”

The surprise man went on to talk about prayers and how they work. He's states that one prayer is said, but there are others that are not, which is true. But, it is also an understatement, God knows your prayers before you do. The church went on to pray for victory in the war, but according to the man, in order for them to win the war, the other country would have to lose. There’s nothing wrong with that, until he starts the prayer. “O Lord our God, help us to tear their soldiers to bloody shreds with our shells; help us to cover their smiling fields with the pale forms of their patriot dead.” The author made this ironic because the man prayed for them, but not what they were asking him to pray for. That community didn’t know what was going to happen in order to win the war, and the man brought the reality to them.

By the end of the piece, the author tells that everything the man was saying is true. “It was believed afterward that the man was a lunatic, because there was no sense in what he said.” The things the man said are common sense, and the author knows that. He knows that for one country to win, the other has to lose badly. He knows that there are prayers that go unvoiced. The author showed the community the reality of war and of prayer.

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-This relates to my guiding principle because I was timed and so I was rushed because I did not want to come back in and finish it so I had to finish the whole essay in about 30 minutes. I was unprepared and I rushed and in turn did not get a very good grade. This essay shows that you can't rush through an AP class because you will not succeed.
-This piece shows that as a writer I do not like to take my time in the things I write. It shows that I usually think the first draft is good enough. (It's not.) I usually try to do everything to my best ability, but sometimes I don't like to go back and fix things because I don't want to take the time.
-It shows growth because while I didn't necessarily take my time, I still made a good point and was able to understand what the prompt was asking, where earlier in the year I might not have been able to. It shows growth because when we started satire I could not pick out what I was supposed to. Other people would say satirical devices but I could not pick  them out, so by the end of the year when we wrote this, I could pick them out. It shows growth as a writer of satire.

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The only thing I want to add is that AP classes have helped prepare me for the amount of work that college is going to have, and while it is something kind of scary to think about I learned how to balance everything so I could get my stuff done on time. I think this is important to add because at the beginning of last year, I could not manage my time. I would put everything off until the last minute or I would work on the unimportant stuff first, but AP classes have shown me how to pick what is important and to work on it over a period of time and get it done.