Monday, April 18, 2011

Absurdity of the Best AP English Day


“I feel very happy” as I make my way to  AP English in an especially chipper mood, full of excitement for Carolyn, Haley and I to run AP English for a day (Wilde 29). Our plan consists of our putting our classmates and Ms. Serensky through ridiculous obstacles for our own personal entertainment. For starters I love the poem we decided to teach, “If” by Rudyard Kipling. It preaches the importance of making the most of time and staying true to oneself, a lesson we learned once again through reading Everything Matters! as a class.  Teaching the poem “If” by Rudyard Kipling led us to the decision to play a series of minute to win it games and we thus began to set them up in the correct order and getting the class into teams. First we began with the M&M game. The classroom filled with chaos as people pranced around the room grabbing at different colors of M&M’ and fitting their hands into tiny Dixie cups at rapid speed. After the commotion died down we started up the next game. When we arrived upon the cookie game, where the contestants received the task of wiggling a cookie down their face and into their mouths, Ms. Serensky rose up to test her cookie wiggling skills. Simple at first, “But for some reason it set us to laughing. It starts off slow, a couple little chuckles, then gathers momentum until we’re almost paralyzed by it” (Currie 252). Haley demonstrated her professional skills and got the cookie in her mouth with ease that can only come from the luckiest of instances. Then onto the sniffing cotton ball game which I happen to like the best. We explain that one must move the cotton balls with only their noses to across the room and we can immediately tell the entire class doesn’t “seem to get it strait in their mind[s]” (Kesey 196). More laughter erupts as we watch our usually quite setting fill with frantic individuals with cotton balls stuck up their noses. We then settled the atmosphere with a discussion led by lines from the poem and questions that pertained to the morals the poem advocates. As my favorite day in AP English we found a way to act absurd while still learning the importance of every minute.

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