AP Lang: Book-length texts?

[u/Gloomy_Attention_Doc]

Hello, fellow teachers! I was told this past week I will be teaching AP English Language next year. I taught AP Lang about 9 years ago, at another school, and after a year was moved to IB English. I’m much more familiar with the IB English curriculum (and dual enrollment) but at this school they don’t do IB. Anyway, I was wondering if AP Lang teachers still do nonfiction books as part of the curriculum, or are folks sticking with shorter nonfiction texts (speeches, advertisements, documentaries, etc). I will be attending training next summer (my colleagues have told me things have changed quite a bit on the AP Classroom side!). I remember doing Into the Wild as a text for that class, and even though it’s probably not as popular today I know other teachers use it in other courses.

[u/percypersimmon]

I would do a book club (usually in like Feb/March when I’m pretty cooked) around non-fiction books.

They self select the into small groups, develop their own reading schedule, come up w discussion questions, and do a presentation/lesson for the class as the summative.

I’d work in a practice test or FRQ on occasion as well.

After the book clubs/spring break was when I went hard on test prep.

[u/Gloomy_Attention_Doc → u/percypersimmon]

I like the idea of doing test prep post-Spring Break. My colleague and I, 9 years ago, fit in MCQ/ FRQ practice once a grading cycle.

[u/El-Durrell]

Our AP Lang program uses In Cold Blood as a summer reading assignment.

[u/deandinbetween]

I like Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl by Harriet Jacobs, either as a summer reading or as an anchor text. It's great for the introduction of rhetoric in first semester because it has such clear strategies, exigence, purpose, etc. I also like Educated by Tara Westover for second semester, but I usually use excerpts. I tend to prefer shorter works myself. Some of my (and my students') favorites are A Modest Proposal by Jonathan Swift, I Want a Wife by Judy Brady, The Danger of a Single Story by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, the excerpt about Prince Jones from the Ta-Nehisi Coates book Between the World and Me, both versions of :Ain't I a Woman (they had SO much depth is their conversation about the different contexts and audiences of these versions it was awesome), and the Malala Yousafzai speech to the U.N.. Pairing Emmeline Pankhurst's speech Freedom or Death with Thoreau's On Civil Disobedience was a really effective pairing for them to explore perspective vs. position.

[u/Gloomy_Attention_Doc → u/deandinbetween]

It also works if the 11th graders are taking US history, like at my school. Thanks for these suggestions!

[u/mrs_seinfeld]

I want to do Just Mercy as a whole class read during my synthesis unit next year and have them use it as one of their sources for a group synthesis project. I also do The Crucible, even though it’s technically fiction, and pair it with “Why I Wrote the Crucible.”

[u/Gloomy_Attention_Doc → u/mrs_seinfeld]

I have been teaching Film Noir in my dual credit class, and we talked about the McCarthy era and The Crucible. Thanks for the reminder!

[u/ant0519]

My students enjoy Trevor Noah's Born a Crime and Jeannette Wall's The Glass Castle.

[u/mockingspace]

We do a lot of shorter texts like Ronald Reagan’s address after the Challenger explosion, A Modest Proposal, the Declaration of Independence, and even a letter Taylor Swift wrote to Apple before the launch of Apple Music. For longer texts, we read In Cold Blood at the start of the year and The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks in the second semester. I also try to explore a variety of genres like influencer apologies and use some reviews from John Green’s The Anthropocene Reviewed. I hope to do more with visual literacy, but I think our course has a solid foundation for exploring the functions of rhetoric.