Short Story Boot Camp is an idea I stole during one of my AP Camp experiences at St. Johnsbury Academy. During a discussion on vertical integration of curricula (vertical teaming) a teacher explained their method for teaching literary analysis to students being "like a private at boot camp: dirty, smelly and exhausting." The image lingered weeks after AP Camp, and I began to formulate my current method of Literary Analysis Boot Camp.
First, we have the five voice lessons which give us a context for analysis: diction, details, imagery, syntax, and tone. Second, we have the four writing dimensions which give us a direction for solid analytical writing: purpose, organization, detail, and voice. Finally, we have the texts, a variety of pieces collected from magazines, anthologies, and short story collections. Put them all together and you get -- Short Story Boot Camp.
Over the course of the next four weeks you will actively read, discuss, analyze, and write on ten selected short stories. Each story is selected with a focus connected to one of the voice lessons. Every class you will spend half the time discussing (45min) and half the time writing (45 min.). All essays are timed and graded using the College Board's Advanced Placement Scoring Guide for English Literature.
The goal of Boot Camp is simple, but varied. Read. Discuss. Write. Critique. Each of your ten essays will be scored, and progress will be monitored over time to guide and foster growth. Get ready to become dirty, smelly and exhausted.
5 comments:
Hmm. It would appear to me as if this certain *topic* remaines untouched. While there is no prompt, I would have to say thus far I am actually enjoying short story boot camp. I (obviously) believe I could have possibly written essays of a bit higher quality if I had a little longer in which to write said essays, but I believe learning to comprehend and bang a worthy essay out in a short amount of time is a very good way of going about it. Kudos, Mr. Getty. Kudos.
i will say that after working with getty last year as a staff aid and looking at some of the stuff that had to be done with short story boot camp i was not looking forward to the work that we were going to be faced with based off of what i read personally and what i talked to getty about. but i must say that after the past couple of weeks of essays we wrote short story boot camp has been a rather enjoyable experience for me thus far. even tho the fact of only having 40 minutes to write an essay isn't an enjoyable experience and i feel rushed most of the time i like it. i would like it more so if we could have a class prompt to work off from but beggars cant be choosers. but as far as it goes i like it.
I don't mind writing essays but im kind of tired of doing this every class. Its too many in a row. We should take a class off to review how you have been grading these essays and how we will need to grade them. I'm sure it is a good preparation for the exam; i just think its a bit too early for quite this intense work.
He he. This was a general post, not a "prompt post" but I am glad you guys decided to tell me what you think. Thanks for going the extra mile.
To make short story boot camp better, I think that you should grade each essay after we write it and leave comments so we know what we need to do better in our next essay. After writing our first essay you wrote a comment that said that I need to elaborate more on the quotes from the book. So in the next essay I focused on elaborating. I got a higher score on my second essay!!!
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