For the Record: AP English, 1979-1980

In the summer of 2013, in the run-up to my departure from New Orleans, I discarded a thick binder of items from the Advanced Placement (AP) English course that I took as a senior in high school during the 1979-1980 academic year. I now very much regret having done this: in my defense, let me say that the prospect of having to move sometimes causes one to do irrational things.

There are actually two AP English courses:
(1) Language and Composition
(2) Literature and Composition ("Composition and Literature" back then)
The latter was the only AP course offered by my high school and that's the one I took.

AP English was far and away the most rigorous course I took in high school - it was decidedly tougher than analytic geometry/introductory calculus, if I do say so myself. The course was run by one Patricia K. Prather, a take-no-prisoners instructor who did a good job of whipping us all into shape (at least she whipped me into shape). The primary course text was Laurence Perrine's Literature: Structure, Sound, and Sense (2nd edition, published in 1974, buy it here from Amazon); there were one or two supplementary texts whose title(s) I don't remember.

Course content

The course began with what you might call a writing workshop warmup period: if memory serves, I and my fellow classmates were during this time put through writing assignments on point of view, tone, setting, that sort of thing. Subsequently, the course veered into units on the short story, the novel, poetry, and drama; some milestones thereof are detailed below:

The short story

• We all wrote five-paragraph essays on "Tears, Idle Tears" by Elizabeth Bowen, "Youth" by Joseph Conrad, "Two Little Soldiers" by Guy de Maupassant, and "The Drunkard" by Frank O'Connor. I had no recollection at all of writing these essays upon throwing them out.

• We also wrote a literary analysis paper discussing "The Infant Prodigy" by Thomas Mann and "A Hunger Artist" by Franz Kafka.

The novel/la

• Over the course of the year, everyone wrote eight five-paragraph book reports: my first five book reports were on Nineteen Eighty-Four by George Orwell, Roßhalde by Hermann Hesse, We by Yevgeny Zamyatin, One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, and The Metamorphosis by Franz Kafka.

• In the middle of the year (November 1979 through February 1980), we read the following class novels: The Mayor of Casterbridge by Thomas Hardy, Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad, The Plague by Albert Camus, and A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man by James Joyce.

Poetry

• By far the strangest thing I threw out was a detailed prosodic analysis of "Heaven—Haven: A Nun Takes the Veil" by Gerard Manley Hopkins. Trochee, spondee, anapest, what is this stuff? Get it away from me!

• Everyone wrote a literary analysis paper discussing "The Changeling" by Charlotte Mew and "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock" by T. S. Eliot.

Drama

• My last three book reports were on Oedipus the King by Sophocles, A Streetcar Named Desire by Tennessee Williams, and Oedipus at Colonus by Sophocles.

• In class we read out loud parts of An Enemy of the People by Henrik Ibsen and The Tragedy of Othello, the Moor of Venice by William Shakespeare.

• Everyone wrote a literary analysis paper discussing The Wild Duck by Henrik Ibsen and The Cherry Orchard by Anton Chekhov.

Over and above the aforenoted essays/book reports/papers, I chucked a large volume of instructional material for these units that Mrs. Prather had given us throughout the year. Again, I wish I had held onto this stuff, but I didn't.

The course culminated in the AP English Composition and Literature Exam on Monday, 12 May 1980. The exam fee back then was $34; today it's $91 - still a good value if you do well and are then able to get out of taking a semester of X at college. All told it was an intense experience that generated a great deal of camaraderie in the class and great relief when it was all over.

A final comment

I did save one item from my AP English materials, that being my A Streetcar Named Desire book report. I didn't do a very good job on that report and Mrs. Prather accordingly raked me over the coals for it; that said, I would like to take the opportunity to briefly respond to the following part of her critique:

Williams sets the delicate, romantic, obsolete Blanche against the brutal, realistic, vital Stanley to play out one of his themes about the South and its people. They are declining in strength because they cannot adapt to a world in which soft lights, bed baths, mint juleps, and gallantry/hypocrisy are obsolete.

Obsolete? Nah. Blanche was simply a flake who was not up to the task of bettering her situation. Just because Blanche couldn't get her act together doesn't mean that there weren't other Southerners on the scene who could supplant her and enjoy those soft lights, bed baths, and mint juleps. Moreover, societal hypocrisy is as entrenched today as it ever was (in case you haven't noticed).

There, I feel better now.

Reading assignment

Almost all of the works mentioned in this post can be found on the Web. (Indeed, Elizabeth Bowen's "Tears, Idle Tears" and Hermann Hesse's Roßhalde were the only ones I couldn't find! And that doesn't mean they're not out there somewhere.) I offer no guarantee that the following links point to resources that are complete and not in violation of copyright.

Short stories
• "Youth"
• "Two Little Soldiers"
• "The Drunkard"
• "The Infant Prodigy"
• "A Hunger Artist"

Novels and novellas
• Nineteen Eighty-Four
• We
• One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich
• The Metamorphosis
• The Mayor of Casterbridge
• Heart of Darkness
• The Plague
• A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man

Poems
• "Heaven—Haven: A Nun Takes the Veil"
• "The Changeling"
• "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock"

Plays
• Oedipus the King
• A Streetcar Named Desire
• Oedipus at Colonus
• An Enemy of the People
• The Tragedy of Othello, the Moor of Venice
• The Wild Duck
• The Cherry Orchard