Welcome to Mr. Birnbaum’s 11th Grade English Class: Advanced Placement Language & Composition for the 2024-2025 School Year!
Extra Help: Fridays @7AM
Office: Room 235
I would like to extend a warm welcome to all my students to Advanced Placement English: Language and Composition, a most challenging course that focuses on the art of rhetoric and the craft of writing! What is rhetoric you ask? Rhetoric can be defined as the faculty of observing in any given case the available means of persuasion. In this respect, everything you read or observe, such as an advertisement, is for the purpose of persuasion, in which everything can be considered an argument. When the term argument is used in class, it suggests a point of view to be accepted, not a physical altercation or an inappropriate exchange of words.
Required Materials:
Please have a Writer’s Notebook. This can be an individual journal or a designated section of a 5-subject notebook. This will be a place to write and record your creative ideas for writing topics that will at times culminate into formal writing assignments. I will not physically collect the Writer’s Notebook, nor are you expected to share or pass them along to another classmate. If we share our writing, it will be presented orally.
Grading Policy:
Each quarter will account for 22.5% of your final grade leaving 10% for our Regents and Final Exams.
All quarter grades will fall into one of the following categories:
- Product: 70%
- Papers
- Projects
- Presentations
- Exams
- Quizzes
- Process: 30%
- Classwork
- Homework
- Writer’s Notebook
***ALL LATE WORK WILL RESULT IN A FIVE (5) POINT DEDUCTION FOR EACH DAY THE ASSIGNMENT IS NOT SUBMITTED***
Extra Help Policy:
Extra help is offered on Friday mornings in 235 7:00-7:40.
Digital Literacy:
In our multimodal society, the term “literacy” no longer refers exclusively to the reading and writing of printed texts. Scholars, educators, and professionals across disciplines are recognizing the importance of digital literacy to citizenship, education, information-sharing, and community-building. In response, this course will help deepen your understanding of a variety of digital writing technologies and to consider the ways in which our perceptions of self and other are mediated through these and other technologies. Over the course of the year, you will craft and manage a digital identity while you learn about and experiment with a variety of digital composition tools. We will discuss the benefits and risks associated with digital foot printing and will discuss the importance of self-literacy in a digital culture, particularly as it pertains to managing an online identity. In short, this course aims to help you develop not only the skills involved with operating the technologies, but the rhetorical and critical attitude involved with being content-producers and critical analysts of technology.
Laptop Responsibility:
Computers are ubiquitous and will be an integral part of your future education. This class will rely heavily on your devices for daily activities. You are expected to come to class with a fully charged computer every day. You will receive a daily preparedness grade that will count towards your “Process” grade each quarter. They are also our vessel for our virtual learning days.
Our Platforms:
Work may be assigned through TEAMS and in class; therefore, it is imperative before leaving class each day to make certain you are aware of assignments and due dates. This includes homework assignments, classwork assignments, and formal assessments. If I make an edit to an assignment on TEAMS, you should be in receipt of a Notification. When in doubt, email me!
We will also be using OneNote as a class notebook/resource. Please make sure to stay organized!
Familiarity with Microsoft Office and OneDrive will be essential in this class.
Plagiarism and Academic Integrity:
In order to teach proper citations, all papers will be turned in through Turnitin.com. As the final English course prior to college, it’s this course’s duty to teach proper citations to avoid both intentional and unintentional plagiarism for this course and beyond. Using this program to teach rather than to punish is an important component of Senior English; however, egregious and/or repeated plagiarism will be subjected to the district’s policy found in the “Code of Conduct.”
Text Complexity and Diversity
The non-fiction and imaginative works that appear on the Advanced Placement Readings lists are challenging, college-level reading for mature, discerning students. The purpose of a literary work is not to please, but to make the reader think; not to affirm the reader’s beliefs, but, rather, to challenge them, so that they might be affirmed or rejected. Each work of art is an expression of the human experience in all its richness—its diversity—its conflicting opinions. Some literary works at this level may be seen by some as dark and depressing; however, a mature reader knows that light and dark, pleasure and pain, joy and sadness are inextricably intertwined as part of the human experience, each defining and making possible the alternative. The themes of these diverse works attempt to question life’s important issues: the nature of man, the purpose of life, the existence of a higher power, the acquisition of knowledge and wisdom, the moral dilemma of good and evil and more. Students and/or parents who object to a particular work either on the in-class or out-of-class reading list may, after contacting the teacher, elect to substitute a work chosen by the teacher which is equally rigorous and which fulfills the objectives of the assignment. However, no AP work will be removed from the in-class or out-of-class list.
Quarterly Overview
Quarter 1: (09/05-11/08)
- An introduction of the fundamentals of rhetoric and the available means for analysis and composition. Focus is on Aristotle’s Rhetorical Triangle for discourse, which includes the three modes of persuasion: ethos, pathos, and logos.
- Included in the introduction to this course is SOAPSTone for annotation and conducting close readings, rhetorical tools and devices including but not limited to: anaphora, antithesis, antimetabole, litotes, hyperbole, polysyndeton, asyndeton, metonym.
- Students study diction, including the distinctions between formal and informal diction and how diction establishes tone.
- Texts for rhetorical analysis include but are not limited to the following:
- Speeches and Letters: Lou Gehrig’s Farewell Speech, George W. Bush’s Address to the Nation, Albert Einstein’s Letter to Phyllis
- Selected texts from The Transcendentalist: Ralph Waldo Emerson’s, “Self-Reliance”
- Henry David Thoreau’s, “Where I Lived and What I Lived For”
- Personal Essay
- E.B. White’s, “Once More to the Lake”
- Students learn to craft their own personal essay using rhetorical devices and supporting a twofold claim with personal anecdote, evidence, and a counterclaim.
Quarter 2: (11/12-01/24)
- The second marking period continues to focus on the classic nonfiction essay. Students use the selected texts this quarter (see below) to identify rhetorical devices and how they help the writer achieve his/her purpose in terms of an argument.
- Texts for analysis include:
- Jonathan Swift’s, “A Modest Proposal”
- Martin Luther King Jr.’s, “Letter From Birmingham Jail”
- George Orwell’s, “Shooting an Elephant”
- As the course progresses, students further expand their knowledge of argument by studying the elements of Mystery, including: inductive vs. deductive reasoning, syllogisms, common fallacies, types of claims, types of warrants, types of evidence, support, backing, counter arguments and refutation backing, counter arguments and refutation
- Students learn how to craft a classical argument.
- ELA Regents 21 January 2025 @ 9:15 AM
Quarter 3 (01/27-04/04)
- The third marking period unit of study focuses on the deterioration and evolution of the English Language. A seed text used is George Orwell’s, 1984 and “Politics and the English Language.”
- Other works include the poetry of Naomi Shihab Nye, specifically, “Why I Could Not Accept Your Invitation” and “For Mohammed Zeid of Gaza, Age 15”.
- “Superman and Me” by Sherman Alexie
- “I Know Why the Caged Bird Cannot Read” by Francine Prose
- Various Poetry
- Various lessons center on culprits of the deterioration of language such as, Gobbledygook and euphemisms, bombastic language, slang, pretentious diction; while other lessons focus on style and the Dos of writing, such as precision and clarity, the economy of words, traditional sentence structure vs. stylistic structure (breaking the rules once you know the rules) to achieve a certain effect
- Students learn how to write a synthesis essay and evaluate sources
Quarter 4 (04/07-6/25)
- AP Language and Composition Exam 07 May 2025 @ 8:00 AM
- The fourth quarter of study takes students back to the world of literature with a rhetorical slant, in which they no longer read just for a literary analysis, but also a rhetorical analysis: How does the author’s language help express his/her theme or develop his/her character or advance the plotline.
- Text selection for this unit may include Voltaire’s satirical novella, Candide, George Bernard Shaw’s, Pygmalion, or Shakespeare’s, Hamlet
- Students write a classical argument as literary criticism, in which they find and evaluate sources to include as both evidence and support for their claims.
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