Response To Course Materials #8....Last One!!!!!

We're almost there...only a few more weeks until the dreaded AP exam.  Since the last post we've finished Ceremony and annotated the whole book, which took some time.  But after annotating I found a lot of important things, for example the repetition of the color blue, and the idea of lions, bears, and deer.  After discussing the novel and reading many articles talking about it and the culture I was able to see the novel in an analytic way, and I pulled out the theme of change/transformations.  This book showed me that there's a lot more that what's on the surface, obviously this is true for all the books we have read because we keep digging to find new meanings, but with Ceremony I felt like the deeper levels were achieved by learning more about the Laguna culture rather than just analyzing.  When it comes to the previous books we have read the only similarity I see with Tayo and the other characters is the idea of identity.  Tayo is like Biff in that sense because they both don't know themselves because they are trying to live up to the standards of others.  For Biff it's his father he's trying to impress, and with Tayo it's the whole community and their idea that Tayo is inferior to then because he's not full Laguna.

We have now started to read Fifth Business and this book is definitely easier to read than any of the other books, and we don't have to annotate it!!!!!!!  So far I'm enjoying the book, and I'm interested to see where the Jung ideas we talked about in class will fit into this novel.  Now moving on to the AP exam, Im still nervous for it because I don't know if my analyzing skills are strong enough, but I think doing the practice multiple choice during FLEX will help!