AP Open Question #1

AP Open Question #2

Prose Close Reading Chart #1

Prose Close Reading Passage #1

              The window was as tall as a door, and he had imagined many times that it would open onto some other place and let him walk through and be there. During his first weeks in the hospital, he had been hardly able to movie his head, and all that kept his mind occupied had been watching out the window and picturing the old green places he recollected form home. Childhood places. The damp creek bank where Indian pipes grew. The corner of a meadow favored by brown-and-black caterpillars in the fall. A hickory limb that overhung the land, and from which he often watched his father driving cows down to the barn at dusk. They would pass underneath him, and then he would close his eyes and listen as the cupping sound of their hooves in the dirt grew fainter and fainter until it vanished into the calls of katydids and peepers. The window apparently wanted only to take his thoughts back. Which was fine with him, for he had seen the metal face of the age and had been so stunned by it that when thought into the future, all he could vision was a world from which everything he counted important had been banished or had willingly fled.
              By now he had stared at the window all through a late summer so hot and wet that the air both day and night felt like breathing through a dishrag, so damp it caused fresh sheets to sour under him and ting black mushrooms to grow overnight from the limp pages of the book on his bedside table. Inman suspected that after such long examination. the grey window had finally said about all it had to say. That morning, though, it surprised him, for it brought to mind a lost memory of sitting in school, a similar tall window beside him framing a scene of pastures and low green ridges terracing up to the vast hump of Cold Mountain. It was September. The hayfield beyond the beaten dirt of the school playground stood pant-waist high, and the heads of the grasses were turning yellow from need of cutting. The teacher was a round little man, hairless and pick of face. He owned by one rusty black suit of clothes and a pair of old overlarge dress boots that curled up at the those and were so worn down that the heels were wedgelike. He stood at the front of the room rocking on the points. He talked at length through the morning about history, teaching the older students of grand wars fought in ancient England.
            After a time of actively listening, the young Inman had taken his hat from under the desk and held it by its brim. He flipped his wrist, and the hat skimmed out the window and caught an updraft and soared. It landed far out across the playground at the edge of the hayfield and rested there black as the shadow of a crow squatted on the ground. The teacher saw what Inman had done and told him to go get it and to come back and take his whipping. The man had a big paddleboard with holes auguered in it, and he liked to use it. Inman never did know what seized him at that moment, but he stepped out the door and set the hat on his dead at a dapper rake and walked away, never to return.

~Frazier 4-5

Prose Close Reading Passage Essay (with Passage Text) #2

      Late in the afternoon, cold rain began falling, and Inman walked with little enthusiasm through the close of day into dark. Sometime well past the middle of the night, nearly given out, wet as an otter, he stumbled upon a big chestnut tree with a hollow at its base, the bark healed around it like thick lips. He crawled inside and though there was not room to find a position more comfortable than a squat, he was at least in the dry. He sat for a long time listening to the rain fall. He rolled up dead leaves into tight cylinders between thumb and forefinger, then flicked them out into the dark. Lodged there in the tree, he began to feel himself to be a sodden wraith askulk in the night, some gnome or underbridge troll. An outcast, resentful and ready to lash out from spite at any passerby. Later he dozed in and out, waiting for for morning, and then eventually he fell fast asleep wedged tight into the heart of the chestnut.
      He dreamed his dream of Fredericksburg, and then sometime shortly after dawn he awkoe shivering and in a sour mood. He felt as if things were not as he had left them. He tried to rise from the mouth of the tree but found that all the lower reaches of his body had gone dead. He scrambled out from the tree, pulling himself along with his arms. For all the feelin gin his legs, he might have been sawed off from the waist down. If was as if nothing were there, himself in the process of becoming some mere figment, fading from the ground up, as if the journey ahead were to be continued in the form of a veil or mist. A tissue.
      The idea had its appeal. A traveling shade.
       Inman stretched out on the wet ground litter and looked up through the tree limbs and their dripping leaves. The clouds were thick and grey. Blue patches of fog, fine and pale as powder, moved through the overstory of chestnut limbs and oak limbs clutching bright autumn leaves. A grouse drummed off in the woods, a deep violet sound like the beat of Inman's own heart in the moment before it shattered within his chest. He cocked his head up off the ground and listened, thinking that if this was his last day on earth he might at least be alert. But in a moment, wingbeats burst and spluttered and faded off into the woods. Inman looked down his length, and it was with mixed feelings that he found himself mostly there. He tried to wiggle his feet, and they answered the call. He rubbed his face hard with his palms and pulled his twisted clothes into place. He was wet to the skin.
      He crawled to fetch his sacks from the tree and sat back against it and uncapped his water flask and took a long pull. All the food he had left in his haversack was a cup of cornmeal, so he drew together sticks to make a fire for cooking mush. He lit the tinder and blew on it until little silver orbs danced all across his vision, but the fire only flared up once and threw considerable smoke and then went out altogether.

~Frazier 261-262

Prose Close Reading Chart #2

Poetry Close Reading Essay (with Poem) #1

Ithaka by Constantine Cavafy

As you set out for Ithaka

 hope your road is a long one,

 full of adventure, full of discovery.

 Laistrygonians, Cyclops, angry Poseidon -

 don't be afraid of them:

 you'll never find things like that on your way

 as long as you keep your thoughts raised high,

 as long as a rare sensation

 touches your spirit and your body.

 Laistrygonians, Cyclops, wild Poseidon -

 you won't encounter them

 unless you bring them along inside your soul,

 unless your soul sets them up in front of you.

 Hope your road is a long one.

 May there be many summer mornings when,

 with what pleasure, what joy,

 you enter harbours you're seeing for the first time;

 may you stop at Phoenician trading stations

 to buy fine things,

 mother of pearl and coral, amber and ebony,

 sensual perfumes of every kind -

 as many sensual perfumes as you can;

 and may you visit many Egyptian cities

 to learn and go on learning from those who know.

 Keep Ithaka always in your mind.

 Arriving there is what you're destined for.

 But don't hurry the journey at all.

 Better if it lasts for years,

 so you're old by the time you reach the island,

 wealthy with all you've gained on the way,

 not expecting Ithaka to make you rich.

 Ithaka gave you the marvelous journey.

 Without her you wouldn't have set out.

 She has nothing left to give you now.

 And if you find her poor, Ithaka won't have fooled you.

 Wise as you have become, so full of experience,

 you'll have understood by then what these Ithakas mean.

Prompt: Read carefully the following poem by ________ about ______________. Then write an essay in which you describe the speaker’s attitude toward _______________________. Using specific references to the text, show how the use of language reveals the speaker’s attitude.

Poetry Close Reading Chart #1

Poetry Close Reading Chart #2

Poetry Close Reading Essay (with Poem) #2

A Sight in Camp

By Walt Whitman

A Sight in camp in the day-break grey and dim,

As from my tent I emerge so early, sleepless,

As slow I walk in the cool fresh air, the path near by the hospital

     tent,

Three forms I see on stretchers lying, brought out there, untended

     lying,

Over each the blanket spread, ample brownish woollen blanket,

Grey and heavy blanket, folding, covering all.

Curious, I halt, and silent stand;

Then with light fingers I from the face of the nearest, the first,

     just lift the blanket:

Who are you, elderly man so gaunt and grim, with well-grey'd hair,

     and flesh all sunken about the eyes?

Who are you, my dear comrade?

Then to the second I step--And who are you, my child and darling?

Who are you, sweet boy, with cheeks yet blooming?

Then to the third--a face nor child, nor old, very calm, as of

     beautiful yellow-white ivory;

Young man, I think I know you--I think this face of yours is the face

     of the Christ himself;

Dead and divine, and brother of all, and here again he lies.

Prompt: Read the following poem by ____ carefully. Then write a well-organized essay in which you briefly summarize its content and discuss how the diction and imagery reveal the speaker’s attitude toward _________.

Multiple Choice Questions

Multiple Choice Answers and Rationale

Holistic Bibliography Page (MLA)