The AP Lit course this year experienced a major spike in popularity, with a whopping 130 students out of 305 graduating class currently enrolled in the class. Throughout the year, students delved into a variety of books and units.
However, the final unit before seniors receive their cap and gowns and walk across the stage focuses on a topic most students have been learning their whole academic lives: poetry. The AP Lit teacher, Jason Jenkins, assures his students that this poetry unit differs from all previous curricula that the 12th graders have encountered.
This is poetry reimagined, meant to be less rigorous than other units, and taught to keep a sharp focus on the impending AP testing in the coming weeks. Jenkins explains, “Throughout the year, we’ve learned how to read and annotate, write thesis statements, how to do quotations, write in a sophisticated way, and how to identify things in a sophisticated way.”
Although we have learned a variety of different units throughout the academic year, Jenkins explains how this will differ from previous classes, stating, “Mrs. West currently has a bracket where she had more than 64 poets, all of which competed against each other which was a new thing for me as a teacher and for my class that is different from previous units.”
Lastly, Jenkins details why he is excited to teach this unit, mentioning, “I want to teach students about the joy of poetry and how some poems might be better than others, even though they are all artistic expressions.”
Senior Xander Povey is among the many students eagerly awaiting this unit. He shares, “Mr. Jenkins is really good at encouraging thoughtfulness. In all of our units, he really goes above and beyond, which inspires students to challenge their prior knowledge and redefine the way that they look at literature as a whole.”
Povey, who frequently shares his poetry online and with friends, adds, “I do a lot of writing, including monologues and poetry. I’m always looking to get a little more experience or formal education on poetry. A lot of poems are very feelings-based, and it’s really good to study rhetorical schemes and rhymes.”
Despite the anticipation for the upcoming poetry unit in AP Literature classes, students remain mindful of the looming AP testing in the weeks ahead.
