Fred Lindstrom, Writing Tutor

The core task of any Advanced Placement English Literature and Composition instructor is to prepare students to succeed on the exam. To that end, it is essential that all teachers adhere to the AP curriculum; working from this foundation, teachers select challenging texts and train students to write efficient and effective responses to a wide variety of classical and modern source materials and prompts.

Over the years I have taught two different AP Literature and Composition courses: “Women at the Edge: Literature by and About Women,” and “Cherry Blossom and Pine: Ecological and Nature Writing in World Literature.”

The former featured an intensive and wide-ranging study of novels, novellas, short story, poetry, and non-fiction writing by 19th-21st century women. Students read classics such as Wuthering Heights and Their Eyes Were Watching God and short stories by Kate Chopin, Angela Carter, Doris Lessing, Lucia Berlin, Z.Z. Packer, and Xi Xi. Students explored the themes of woman and madness, reading Nelle Bly’s expose of the Women’s Insane Asylum as well as Dorothea Dix’s 1833 appeal to the state of Massuchusetts to improve the conditions of those incarcerated due to mental illness, as well as the writings of Elizabeth Packard who campaigned to change laws in Illionois and Iowa that allowed husbands to commit their wives to prison by reason of insanity, which resulted in the passing of “Mrs. Packard’s Personal Liberty Law.”

The latter surveyed literature about the natural world as the locus for spirtual inspiration and cleansing, for encountering the beautiful and the eternal, as well as our tendency to see events in nature as a reflection of our wild or uncivilized desires. Students also read a variety of literary texts from around the world that challenge man’s abuses of nature and the inhumanity of the modern industrialized world. Readings included a variety of poems and short stories by representatives of the Anglophone Romanticists, as well as Wuthering Heights. Students also read a number of works in translation, including Ah Cheng’s The King of Trees, Hwang Sok-yong’s Familiar Things, and Sion Miura’s The Easy Life in Kamusari, which discuss Mao Zedong’s “Down to the Rivers, Up to the Mountains” campaign, the ecological and human cost of Korea’s “Miracle on the Han,” and a Japanese ode to a traditional way of living in and profiting from nature.