Review of the past week

Here I will give a brief summary of what we have been working on over the past week. I apologize for the lack of recent updates. I have been quite ill, but should be getting back on schedule for daily updates to the blog.

American Literature

Last week students worked on responding in writing to the questions about the Frontier in America. These questions drew on a number of sources that demonstrated some beliefs and attitudes towards the frontier land. The capstone of this consideration was our study of the "Gettysburg Address." Students memorized the Address and participated in a school assembly recitation yesterday (Nov. 20). We discussed how the Address was symbolically a baptism of America. In a baptism ceremony, the old man of sin is buried in the water and a new man is "born again" as he emerges from the water. Baptism represents the consecration (or dedication) of a man to Christ's cause as he emerges with a new identity. In similar fashion, Lincoln provided a symbolic "baptism" of the United States in his address. He begins with the archaic language, even for his days, of "four score and seven years ago" which clearly echoes Biblical language. Thus he hearkens back to the Declaration of Independence as the moment of "conception" of the nation and simultaneously points to the shared Judeo-Christian values of the Founding. Throughout the speech he refers to a "new birth" of the nation, even while dedicating the graves of the men who have died at Gettysburg. It is as if he is saying that this battle has paid the price for the collective sin of the nation, of slavery, and that from hence forth the listeners will be newly dedicated to the proposition that "all men are created equal." It is interesting to note the shift in American consciousness which occurred as Americans stopped referring to the United States in the plural (The United States are) and began referring to them in the singular (The United States is). This shift may echo the transformation of identity marked by the Gettysburg Address which--in contrast to the Declaration of Independence which declares the states to be "free and independent"--discusses an identity of unity. Lincoln's presidency and war clearly established the inadmissible notion that secession from the Union was a valid and viable option. If rule of law was to prevail in a democracy, the people must be willing to submit to the will of the majority, rather than indulge the divisive impulse which would destroy the rule of democratic law.

Thus Abraham Lincoln's Gettysburg Address shifts and strengthens the focus of Jefferson's vision of an empire of liberty, and of Winthrop's "city upon a hill", as it demonstrates not just to Americans but to the entire world, the possibilities and constraints of liberty.

Having considered the concept of the frontier as the heart of democracy, in our unit on American Nature Writing, students are now moving on to consider the quintessential American Nature writers: Emerson and Thoreau. We will be exploring the American Transcendentalist movement by reading excerpts from Emerson's essay "Nature" and Thoreau's book Walden.

AP
Students continue to work on their synthesis essays on the Wilderness Act of 1964. They also read sample student essays from a past AP Synthesis Essay Question (2011 on locavores). They read explanations of the scoring of these sample exams.