<p>I'm in APUSH right now as a sophomore and will be taking AP Eng Lang next year. APUSH isn't that bad in my opinion. My teacher says my outlines and essays are great, and he's a really tough grader. I have a 95% in that class.</p>
<p>Anyway, how many hours of homework a day are there in AP Lang? What do you normally do in that class? 1000 word essays? 5000 word essays? Specificity please!</p>
<p>AP English Language is a class about learning how to identify the METHODS and TOOLS that writers use to get their point across or develop character/plot. It is a class wher you need to learn how to read critically. In my AP Lang class last year, the homework was primarily reading whatever we were assigned each night. In our class, there was a significant emphasis on nonfiction works, like essays, speeches, and articles, in addition to actual novels. We usually had to identify things like author’s purpose and types of devices as we read–for example, “this author is using pathos, anaphora, and parallelism to emphasize this argument about this topic.” So the homework isn’t hard, but it can be time-consuming depending on what your teacher gives you. I spent about an hour each night on it (maybe more if we had a lot of reading), but the essays were far more demanding.</p>
<p>The essay prompts you’ll get will likely be quite different from essay prompts you’ve gotten in the past. You’ll be asked to analyze actual text and style rather than just characters or plot. My teacher wanted us to learn about rhetoric and argumentation, so we wrote some very difficult argumentative essays.</p>
<p>As for length, I can’t really say that there’s a normal wordcount for AP Lang work. My teacher’s style was giving us really difficult prompts and a limited amount of space and time to answer them effectively. Expect to churn out stronger essays for more complex prompts in less time.</p>
<p>An example of a prompt I had to write on:
“Examine Hamlet’s famous soliloquy in II.ii.501-540 and Claudius’ confession in III.iii.36-72, 97-98. Compare and contrast these characters as dramatic opposites or twins. ** Discuss Shakespeare’s use of literary and rhetorical devices to reveal each character’s state of mind.**” The sentence I bolded is the AP Lang part–analyzing style adds another layer on top of the traditional “talk about this character or plot” prompt.</p>
<p>Any other questions? (English is my best subject, so I’ll admit that I’m biased toward this class. I loved it.)</p>
<p>It all varies by class. My homework/classwork is fairly consistent though. We are always reading 1-2 books (always one that is self-paced/we have one date that the book has to be done by and sometimes a second one that we read x number of chapters for by the following class). Personally I am a quick reader and never spend more then an hour on a school night do the readings. We are also occasionally doing projects (fairly easy) and write journal writes (that is what my teacher calls them, but in reality they are mini papers) after each book, those tend to be 3-6 pages (nothing major). The only other assignment is each quarter we have to find 50 words we don’t know (they can be found from watching TV, talking to friends, reading, listening to music and so on) and document them. Personally I find the class extremely reasonable (I finished last quarter with 102), though I know some people who have struggled with it.</p>
<p>Oh and for what we do in class, we will do practice essays, book discussions, multiple choice practice, test strategies, grammar, history relating to the books and some other random stuff.</p>
<p>It really depends from school to school and class to class in both material and intensity. My friend took it as a junior at his school and it was very intensive. They wrote essays every night. I take it as a senior in a different school and we do nothing for the most part. I’m serious, I go into class, the teacher gets side tracked for 25 minutes, then I hear about what a synthesis essay is, and then it’s time to go. The teacher actually spent one class teaching us about contractions (one can understand why I do dual enrollment). My friend’s class wrote over 100 essays. I have written about 5 so far. </p>
<p>It depends on the school, the teacher, and the class. There’s no way of predicting what the class will be like unless you talk to the current instructor and current students.</p>
<p>I hate English and don’t consider it to be a real subject. That being said, I got a 5 somehow. In class, I always sucked at MC but got 8-9s on essays, considering that I love studying argument. I skipped one section of MC on the exam, but rocked the essays. Good stuff.</p>
<p>How can you not consider English a real subject? Ideas couldn’t be communicated properly without it, and one of the largest art forms (literature) is completely based on it…</p>
<p>AP Language isn’t about how long your essays are. No AP test is like that. If that’s the idea you’ve gotten, you need to get rid of it fast. My teacher told us to get rid of the five paragraph essay format we’ve gotten used to. It’s all about identifying what you’ve been asked in the question, the hidden whats, and communicating your ideas properly with developed evidence. </p>
<p>In my class, we work on vocab and analysis in class, and work on literature. Since my class is a combination of both the language and literature tests, we do a lot a literature as well. You will be writing a lot if your teacher’s class is any good. Good luck on your tests!</p>
<p>I have to do Journals about the books that we are reading, etc. It’s a really fun class because we do AP Practice questions once a while and my teacher is really good. I started to write better as well :D</p>
<p>Well we obviously read the literary cannons: Huck Finn, Gatsby, etc. And we often do presentations that convey we know how to detect rhetorical devices and show the author’s purpose for doing so as well as its effect upon the story. </p>
<p>Then we do a lot of practice essays: argument, style, and synthesis (in chronological order). Argument is self explanatory you get a topic and you either defend, challenge, or qualify. Style you get a piece of text and analyze it for its rhetorical devices and write about how this aids on the authors writing, etc. Synthesis is like an argument but you are given the evidence (which you don’t receive in the argument essay) from 5 sources and have to cite at least 3. </p>
<p>We also do some socratic seminars on a prompt and basically have a massive discussion about it. We do a little more but that’s the gist of it.</p>
<p>We do nothing, each day we do mindless “peerediting” of “essays” which in reality are single paragraph rhetorical responses. Other times we talk about the books we read, go off on random tangents. Our teacher has not mentioned the word Synthesis Essay or Argumentative essay. Am I alone on this?</p>
<p>We did quite a bit of analyzing literature, from short stories and plays in class to independent novels. So far, we’ve read The Great Gatsby, A Separate Peace, To Kill A Mockingbird, Farewell to Manzanar, and currently have Of Mice and Men. (The other period read Things Fall Apart instead of Farewell.) We just finished a unit on persuasion and satire and are starting a unit on identity. We are also working on an analytical research paper, but that’s a requirement from the community college that the class is a dual enrollment opportunity. (A waste of time and money for me. The credits probably won’t transfer to where I want to go) English 11 (What AP Language is replacing credit wise) in Pennsylvania has to be focused on American Lit, which kind of sucks… </p>
<p>The only problem is that the class is huge. My grade has a lot of kids that were, I guess you could say, unjustly placed in honors English as a freshman and, since our school got rid of the honors classes and just have AP, a lot of people took AP when they probably shouldn’t have. Same goes for my AP World class. APUSH is really tough at my school, and a lot of the APWH class are newbies… </p>
<p>But I should do alright on the AP Language exam. Our teacher gave us some practice packets and I’ll review them before the exam. What sucks though is we’re actually off school the day of the exam, so we need our own rides there and home, AND it’s the day before prom… </p>
<p>Sent from my Nexus 7 using CC</p>
<p>My teacher is insane and he assigned a ludicrous amount of books for my class to read throughout the year. I read the first one, used Schmoop and Sparknotes for the rest and pulled out an A. </p>
<p>Not a single kid in my class read a book after he assigned Huck Finn (october) so now we’re all screwed for the AP test. The teacher refuses to review for AP and babbles on about how “it’s the learning that matters, not the test, not your grade.”</p>
<p>So yeah. AP English classes can be pretty terrible if you get a bad teacher, because they don’t need to follow a strict curriculum. </p>
<p>BTW: Anyone have advice/tips for the multiple choice? Nobody in our class can finish the multiple choice on time with above 45 right, but most of us have 22-2400 SATS. A few of us got review books today but we’re not sure whether to use Princeton Review of Cliffnotes. Any advice would be greatly appreciated.</p>
<p>It is one of the most difficult and rewarding classes I took. We were always reading 6-7 books at any one time (a total of something like 36 or more books throughout the year). About half my class did all the reading, the rest got by with Shmoop and such. The essays were incredibly demanding such as:</p>
<p>“Analyze how place and setting mirror character development in [insert three books of your choice]”</p>
<p>That essay was a killer – most people failed because they misread the prompt. The class, I’m sure, varies in difficulty, but it is super rewarding in my view.</p>
<p>I’ve always been an A student and this class conquered me! By far the most work and effort, despite the fact that I thought it would be one of my easier AP classes. It largely (extra emphasis here) depends on the teacher, but you can expect to transform as a writer of the course of the year. Yes, this class took down my GPA a bit, but I also came out a changed writer. I came in thinking my writing was superb and thought I did good on our first diagnostic-ish essay. Boy, was I wrong when I got that 4(out of 9) on an essay. I just took the AP test today and will be upset if I get anything less than a 4 or 5 on it after all the work I put in. This is one of the few classes where no matter how hard you try, you could very well not get the grade you want, regardless of what you do. This is my own personal experience so far… since I envy friends with other teachers who walk away with an easy A’s doing nothing, but remind myself that they have learned nothing in comparison. In other words, your experience in AP lang largely depends on your teacher. There were nights I got little to no sleep. My class did double journals all year, and read/analyzed/annotated too many essays to count. We read less books, but annotated many essays and took numerous practice prompts. Started with a 4/9 on essays, raised them to 5-6/9, and am finally in the place where I can get 7-8/9. </p>
<p>Don’t underestimate this class.</p>