Second Blog Entry: Poetry Study Goals

Poetry Study Goals:

• Read lines how they are written, not how each line ends. (punctuation)
• Find major themes/ideas
• Keep up with figurative language and understand all allusions 
• Understand literary elements
• Read through the poem at least twice, and find something I didn't catch the first time

I chose these things because I feel that if I conquer each one, I will be able to completely conquer poetry itself. It all starts out with the basics though. First, I need to start reading poems with the correct punctation, a lot of the time I just place an imaginary period at the end of each line, and things don't flow and make a complete thought. I also feel if I took an extra second to think about the poem and find the major theme, all the contributing factors to it would pop out a lot easier at me and I would be able to dissect the poem more easily. Next, I need to work on language and knowing what certain words and ideas are alluding to in the poem. That will help me understand the poem as a whole. Also with the basics, literaty elements are very important. Just the way poems are simply written have meaning, and once I am able to figure out the way they are written, I can read the poem in a more fluent, understandable way. All of these go to show why I need to read through the poem at least twice, so that I can for sure pick up on each different goal.

First Entry: Reflection of Diagnostic Test

After taking the Diagnostic test, I wasn't too confident with my answers. For most of them I just took my most educated guess and went with it. There were a ton of vocab words that I was pretty unfamiliar with as well, and I need to look more closely at those because I recognized that a lot of them were on the terms list that we need to know very soon. When I went to check my answers though, I was pleasantly surprised with the results. I got the ones wrong that I was almost positive I would get wrong, but there were many I completely took a guess on and got right. I noticed that this test was pretty similar to the ACT test, which the reading portion of that test is always my weakest, so I wasn't too happy. I do believe however that I will be able to conquer this come time for the actual AP test, so for a first run through, I didn't do too bad.