Reflection

Colby Carter

English 102-111

January 18, 2012

Reflection

My Senior year of high school I took AP Literature and Composition. I had an amazing teacher who challenged all of my thoughts and opinions regarding Literature. As a class we read so many novels by amazing writers. We wrote a response paper to each novel we completed and also had many hands on projects regarding each one. At the end of the year we did many practice AP test essay prompts. The AP exam essays give you a statement, or question and require the student to respond to the prompt using two or more literary pieces for examples and comparisons. Another essay prompt would require you to read two or more poems and then compare and contrast them. This proved repeatedly to be my biggest challenge. After many practice essays I finally “got the hang of it” and my teacher scored my practice essay at a 6, which is very well for AP exam grading. Throughout the majority of my papers I was arguing a characters point of view or the reasons an author would write certain things.

My best writing experience was my final exam for this class. My teacher required us to take a practice AP exam, from start to finish, timed, and set up exactly like the real one would be. I have always done extremely well on multiple choice, so I was not worried about that. My main concern was that my essays would not score high enough for me to get a score on the AP exam that would allow me to pass the exam. Shockingly the essay that I did the best on was the poem one, I received an eight on it! The highest possible score is a nine. I was so proud of myself and how I did, I had so much confidence going into the real AP exam after receiving the scores for my final exam. The worst experience that I had writing for this class was the first exam of the semester. I did terribly on it, granted I did not spend much time on it, so my grade was worth the amount of effort I put into it. This was a bad experience for me but also very motivational. I love my AP Lit teacher and wanted to impress him. I was so embarrassed when I did poorly that it motivated me to try so much harder on the rest of the papers for this class.