Student: Taya Advisor: Bernarda Del Course: AP Eng. Language & Comp.

Kerwin Villar
Exam Grade: B+ Trimester Grade: B+ Engagement Grade: Meets Final Grade: Not
Expectations Applicable

In AP English Language and Composition, we have begun our year of work as a developing community
of discerning citizens. In order to amplify students analytical dexterity, reading comprehension, and
argumentative practice, we have endeavored into intensive close reading and rhetorical analysis.
Beginning with reading Annie Dillard and her philosophy On Seeing, we engaged with the process of
attentive rhetorical analysis, which we then applied to their summer reading and writing work on
Truman Capotes In Cold Blood. Students workshopped and rewrote their summer essays, and from that
point we took our close reading prowess and delved into a new text with new questions: Katherine
Boos Behind the Beautiful Forevers. We examined, in particular, questions about the environments
effect on ones capacity for moral action and questions about hope, resiliency, and perspective-taking.
In a way, leaping from Boos striking non-fiction narrative about surviving as a trash-picker in
Annawadi, a slum outside of Mumbai, India, and landing in Joan Didions New Journalistic portrait of
Hollywood and its paranoia in the late 1960s seems a long stretch, but what links these writers and their
work is something integral in our studies as readers and as citizens: the imposition of narrative.

Didion writes: We tell ourselves stories in order to live. [...] We look for the sermon in the suicide, for
the social or moral lesson in the murder of five. We interpret what we see, select the most workable of
the multiple choices. We live entirely, especially if we are writers, by the imposition of a narrative line
upon disparate images, by the 'ideas' with which we have learned to freeze the shifting phantasmagoria
which is our actual experience.

We in AP English Language and Composition have been training ourselves to see clearly: both the
phantasmagoria and the imposed narrative line. In studying how other writers craft argument, arrange
and rearrange narrative, and bend in order create more compellingly truthful stories, we learn how to
bolster our own rhetorical strategies. Next term, we will explore the ideas and strategies rhetorical
masters Ta-Nehisi Coates, James Baldwin, Beverly Daniel Tatum, Rainier Spencer, Carlos Hoyt, and
James McBride in our Race & America unit.

Taya is warm, open, and gracious in the classroom: she enters class prepared with careful work and
beaming with contagious positive energy. More, she is a diligent, respectful, and perceptive presence.
Her hard work shows, and her comments during class discussion, though fewer than they could be, are
valued. I encourage Taya to voice her opinion more often she makes logical connections and thoughtful
analyses when she does share. Her writing is well-organized, and her paper on Behind the Beautiful
Forevers showcased thoughtful work with strong big-picture claims. Taya will improve her writing by
incorporating more argument-based topic sentences, eliminating reader-directed phrasing, passive
structure, and weakly phrased observations and by developing purposeful word choice. She has firm,
well-founded ideas her writing will improve when she brings more assertive, detail-attentive phrasing
and confidence to those ideas. It is a pleasure to work with Taya, and I look forward to her continued
growth and success as a reader, writer, and thinker.

Rachael Jennings

____________________________