Dear AP Comp-ers:
If you are reading this letter, you’re probably signed up for AP Language and Comp for the year 2018-2019. Welcome! This is the summer homework letter you’ve been waiting for. If you’re thinking, wait a second, summer and homework should never be in the same sentence, stop thinking that. Summer is for both lounging in hammocks and intellectual exploration.
AP Language and Compositions is, ideally, a class about understanding the world through argument, understanding the ways that we use ideas competitively and cooperatively. We learn by exploring the competing narratives, the alternative explanations, the warring tribes. This summer, we’d like you to do a deep dive into a topic and give multiple sides a fair hearing before deciding what you think is true. What are the takeaways? What can we conclude?
Over the summer, you’ll choose a topic of interest and then watch one documentary and read two nonfiction books on your topic. Then, you’ll write a 2-page, 1000-word minimum essay that describes the different perspectives you observed and relate what you have learned after your reading and thinking.
You can choose any academic topic (defined here as something that might be discussed in a college course) or choose an example from below:
Project: Social Media and Culture
First Book:
American Girls: Social Media and the Secret Lives of Teenagers by Nancy Jo Sales
Second Book:
Everything Bad is Good for You: How Popular Culture is Actually Making us Smarter by Steven Johnson
Possible Documentaries/TED lectures:
“Connected but Alone?” Sherry Turkle TED
The Cleaners (2018) dirs. Moritz Riesewieck and Hans Block)
Project: Race and Crime
First Book:
Ghettoside: A True Story of Murder in America by Jill Leovy
Second Book:
The War on Cops: How the New Attack on Law and Order Makes Everyone Less Safe by Heather Mac Donald
Project: Memoir and Identity
First Book:
Hunger by Roxanne Gay
Just Kids by Patti Smith
Second Book:
An Odyssey by Daniel Mendelsohn
Possible Documentaries/TED Talks:
The Act of Killing (2012) dir. Joshua Oppenheimer
What Happened, Miss Simone(2015) dir. Liz Garbus
For further help, I’ll include a list of good nonfiction work at my website:
If you have any questions, feel free to contact Mr. Stearns at nathan.stearns@shorelineschools,org.We look forward to meeting you and seeing what you can do.
Sincerely,
Nate Stearns