Sophistication Fight Club

*Note* The following post is aimed at AP Lit or AP Lang, but can easily work for other reasons in other levels.

Sometimes I am scrolling through Facebook and see a post for school that I want to save until I can sit down on my computer and look at later, so I'll send myself the link to the post.  Sometimes I forget I have done that and it sits in my inbox for many months.  It happened with this particular one on helping students achieve the sophistication point on their AP Exams.

Kristian Kuhn has this great lesson plan for helping students to be aware of how often they use "to be" in their writing.  It's a basic building block of composition. The problem is that when it gets overused, it makes the writing seem rudimentary.  Plus, it is one bugger of a verb to revise.

You can watch his video for yourself:

I was captivated by the idea, but I wanted to incorporate the Rock 'Em Sock 'Em idea even more, so I put the lesson that Kuhn created into this presentation - complete with video fo the robot boxing game:

https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1MHwfcpBffQs3viusOfBI1vaYzccUFcXsabzUGkTUmWo/copy

And with places for students to input their entries.

I'm trying it out next week.  Let me know if you are or if you have another revision lesson you like!

Don't forget to subscribe to Kuhn's YouTube channel and consider checking out my TPT store.  You might enjoy the Archetypes lesson - I find it super helpful for all levels to understand poetry better.

Multiple Choice Monday - 3 Chances

 Here's another fun, easy way to practice multiple choice, whether it be for AP Lit, AP Lang, or just practicing for the state test.

What you will need:

• Multiple choice practice sheets/passages (I just pick up prep books for AP Lit to get the practice questions in the back - the bonus on that is they also provide reasons why an answer is right and why the others are incorrect).
• A way to scan answers (I use ZipGrade)  Zip Grade allows me a scan a test on my phone and get the correct answers quickly.  You can just use it cold, or you can take the time to input your students and give them a code number.  If you do, it will provide tracking data on how well they are doing.  The best part is, you can use it for free if you are just doing a few tests here and there, but if you want to use it more, the cost is just around $6 to $7 a year.  Yes, you read that correctly.  It works on both Android and Apple devices.  No, I am not getting paid to endorse these guys.

OK, so next up I give them their passages (I like giving two passages at a time for my AP Lit students, which is about 25 questions a pop).  I encourage them to mark up their passage sheet with how confident they are in their answers and what may be a close second choice for them.  Then, the fun begins.  They have an answer sheet with two sections on the front and one on the back.   

Once they have filled out the first section, I scan it and tell them the number incorrect.  Because I am devious and enjoy the pain and suffering of my students, I do not tell them which ones they got incorrect.  They then can decide if that grade is good enough, or go back and make changes and bring it up to me to scan for #2, which I will once again tell them how many are incorrect.  If time allows before the end of class (we have a 90 minute period), they can go for scan #3.   I am a jerk, but not a total jerk, so I will take their best of the three. 

Why do this?  For one, it breaks up the monotony of multiple choice practice.  It also gives them a chance to really consider their process of elimination.  They go back and look at the ones they were not sure about and give them extra scrutiny that they otherwise would not have done.

I also printed out the question/answer explanations so that once a student is finished, he or she may check their answers.

If you have alternative ways of practicing your multiple choice, let me know in the comments or shoot me an email!

Want more multiple choice activities?  Try:

• Group Style
• Reverse Process of Elimination
• Speed Training
• Race Horse Style (borrowed from some other extreme teacher out there!)

Reverse Process of Elimination

The following was used in an AP Lit class, but can be used for any class that has a multiple choice test to prepare for.

We all know the best method of answering multiple choice tests is through process of elimination, but we also know that students often skip to trying to jump to the correct answer.    That's great if the correct answer is obvious to them, but not so good if they don't see it right away and often leads to poor decision making.

In AP Lit, the multiple choice questions are quite the bear to get through.  Most prep guides say to shoot for 60% correct.  The kind of kid who is attracted to an AP course does not shoot for 60% and has a hard time dealing with that concept.  We do A LOT of multiple choice practice, so I am always thinking about how to do it differently.

Today I tried reverse process of elimination.  In order to do that, I needed the following items:

• A multiple choice practice passage (just one passage - not a whole slew of them because this will take too long) - the passage I choose was from the Princeton Review AP English Literature and Composition Prep Guide 2023.  I like this book because the multiple choice are, in my opinion, harder than the College Board ones.  Hopefully, they build up to these and when they see the actual test, they will feel a bit more confident.
• An answer document formatted to fit the activity.  I used Fireworks to make it.  You can take mine and alter it to fit your needs or make a new one.  I'll put the image below.  It's formatted oddly because you need the hole punch to reach the answer bubbles.
• Single hole punchers - a week ago, I offered a grammar pass for every hole punch that was donated to the cause.  I now have more than I'll probably ever need.
• Red and black markers

Here's the process.  I mark my answer sheet by coloring in all the wrong answers with my red marker and all the correct answers with my black marker.  Students get an answer sheet, practice passage, and hole punch and get to work.  After reading the passage, they punch out one answer bubble for each of the questions.  The goal here to to punch out a WRONG answer.  This is an answer they are eliminating.

Then it is brought up to me where I will lay it over my answer key.  When I see red, I make a red mark on that bubble (well, the paper surrounding the now vacant bubble).  When I see black, I mark it and then mark out all remaining answer choices in that question.   The students get the answer sheet back and get to try again for all questions that have not been blacked out.  This process is repeated up to four times (since there are only 5 answer choices).

When it is finished, for these ten questions, I chose to give them a 25 base grade and then 2 points for every red mark.  Top grade for that would be a 105.  It looks like this:

That's my key to the left (rather messy after two periods of marking answers) and a finished answer sheet to the right.  I just count the red marks, times by two, add 25 and voila!  

This takes about an hour to do, with some students finishing earlier than others (they had homework they could get started on).  For slow working students, this does increase the amount of time they use considerably, but not enough to cause any problems for me today.

Afterwards, they said it was much more stressful, but they felt it really drove home the process of elimination.  They also felt that the last two attempts were easier since they had less answer choices to choose from (which is the point of process of elimination anyway).

Do you have an interesting way to shake things up with multiple choice?  Let me know in the comments!

AP Lit (and probably a lot of AP Lang as well) - Multiple Choice

 In 2023, someone on the AP Lit Facebook page asked the question of more experienced teachers, what is their advice to students for answering the super hard multiple choice questions on the AP Exam.  The group responded.  I save them all and put them on a Google Doc that you can access here: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1GUzkI_W7xQYddTmVzdbg1NLaLR_4pdvMacuOkX5UNdA/edit

But, if you just want to pursue a bit, here they all are.  These do not come from me, but from the brains of other talented teachers across the country:

Facebook AP Teachers were asked: “What are your best strategies for teaching how to perform better on the multiple choice passages?”

• Don’t think—find.
  
  

• Read the passage first with emotional engagement and curiosity. Some students feel like they should just skim the passage to work quickly, but reading with interest makes answering the questions easier. Use marginalia to record your emotional reaction as you read-- for example, put a smiley face next to a funny line, or !!! next to a line that is surprising. This may help you answer a question about tone or detail!
  
  

•  If an answer is partly wrong, it is wrong. Learn common types of wrong answers-- for example, some answers would be right for a different part of the passage, while others contain some words that are right but some that are wrong. Some have roughly the right content but the wrong tone.
  
  

• Right answers are often a little disappointing and limited. They won't say EVERYTHING you want them to say. This is because it's HARD to write an answer that is completely right, so right answers can't necessarily contain the kind of debatable claims that you might make and defend in a rhetorical analysis essay!
  
  

• Practice by analyzing your wrong answers and figuring out what made them wrong. Then, once you've practiced enough, TRUST YOUR GUT! Don't overthink questions
  
  

• Fill in an answer to every question. There's no penalty for guessing, which actually means you increase your score by guessing.
  
  

• POE strategy (Process of Elimination)
  
  

• If an option is partially wrong, it's completely wrong.
  
  

• Read ALL the response options before choosing one.
  
  

• Unless you are 100% sure you made an error, do not change your answer once you've selected it.
  
  

• Choose the “best” answer…one or two might look sort of correct, but which one is best?
  
  

• Usually extreme answers are wrong.
  
  

• Close reading means reading the passage AND the potential answers closely.
  
  

• Try to imagine a group of college board employees sitting around a conference table making up wrong answers and trying to trick you into thinking they are correct answers … try to understand those devious minds! This is what gives their existence meaning! Lol…don’t let them outsmart you!
  
  

• If it's hard for you, it's hard for someone else too.
  
  

• If you don't know, guess, move on, and don't change the answer- first guesses are more likely to be correct.
  
  

• Read the questions before the passage
  
  

• When in doubt, go with your gut
  

• If the questions refers to a part/line of the passage, go back to that part of the passage and reread it and a line or two before and after
  
  

• I tell my students to read vs skim- most questions are beyond surface level besides the vocab context in meaning ones.
  
  

• I recommend reading the question and seeing if an answer pops in your head and then finding which one matches, while being mindful of lead distractors.
  
  

• Answer line specific questions before reading the poem/passage.
  
  

• I tell them to think about getting as many points as they can. They don't need to worry about what they're getting wrong. Instead, they need to think about what they're getting right. So, on the first pass through, they just need to get to all the questions and not stop and think about any of them for too long. Then, on the second pass through they can go back to the ones that needed a little more thought. "Easy" questions are worth the same amount as "hard." It's all about the number of total points they can get. I also make sure they know that unless they are one of the very, VERY few who get a PERFECT score, they'll never know how many they missed or WHICH questions they missed, so it's different than taking it in a class.
  
  

• Answer broad/theme questions last--after reading the passage/poem.
  
  

• The idea I talk about the most when it comes to narrowing down the last to answers that are both correct, but one is MORE correct, is that if you have seen a theme or an idea in all of the other responses, that that one answer will also connect to that idea.

• B is the new C
  
  

• One time I asked my students who consistently scored well on MC if they had tips or strategies to share with others. One kid raised his hand and then responded, "Well, first of all, I choose the right answer." He was dead serious.
  
  

• There’s usually a good answer and a better answer. Look carefully at every word in each potential answer.
  
  

• Oftentimes kids don’t do well on MC tests because they don’t know all of the vocabulary in the questions. This is especially true when the answers are quotes from the passage.
  
  

• Read the questions CAREFULLY
  
  

• Other than practice, the MCQ section is difficult to prepare or improve upon.
  
  

• Use the process of elimination and then take a guess!
  
  

• Consider how you would phrase your answer to a question before looking at the possible answers— this helps you avoid trap answers
  
  

• Find the rightest answer.  These questions often rely on nuances and so there may be several answers that are potentially correct.  Don’t look for the “correct” answer.  Look for the one that is more correct than the others.
  
  

• Partially wrong answers are completely wrong answers.
  
  

• A simple answer doesn’t make it a wrong answer.
  
  

Who's to Blame? - A Great Class Discussion Lesson

This is my second year doing this and I think I have honed it down to a good 45 minutes to hour-long discussion lesson. 

I got the idea/inspiration from a podcast titled Alarmist.  The format of the show is to pick an event in history, say the sinking of the Titanic, the assassination of JFK, the Donner Party, the Superbowl XXXVIII halftime controversy, and many others like it.  They discuss the event and then start listing (well, they say they are listing it on a board - I'm just an audio listener so I will take them at their word) all the people and traditions and beliefs and anything else that is a factor.  The patriarchy is a common one that makes its way on their list.  Once their board is full, they start eliminating or combining until they have three.  One gets a warning, one gets a slap on the wrist, and the other goes to Alarmist jail.

So I began thinking - this would be awesome to use in a classroom discussion.  So I tried it out last year with my AP kids on who is to blame for Myrtle's death in The Great Gatsby.  It worked ok, but not with the flair I wanted.  I feel that maybe squashed some of the discussion by wanting to list everything first and then talk about it.  This year I did things a little differently. For one, I didn't read Gatsby this year, so I chose The Lord of the Flies.  Our mission was to decide who was to blame for Piggy's death.

It started with this:

The students were given some time to discuss and think about all the contributing factors.  Once I felt they were ready for the challenge, we started taking suspects.  This time, I let each suspect be defended or argued before we moved to a new subject.  That was the key to success.  After a LONG discussion of students getting very heated (but in a good way), the board was packed.  At that point, we marked out some suspects (Isaac Newton was argued for discovering gravity, but we released him from being a person of interest), we combined some suspects into others (Piggy's Auntie and parents were combined and then moved under the umbrella of Piggy), until we finally narrowed it down to our three main contenders: Roger, Human Nature, and Piggy.  

I did it again with the next class and they had the warning going to Roger, the slap on the wrist going to Piggy, and Jack going to AP jail.

This format could be used with almost any book.  Who's to blame for Macbeth's violent run?  Heathcliff's atrocities?  the hanging of Justine Moritz? the suicide of John the Savage?  You get the point!  And the amount of prep work for you is low - assuming you did your job earlier to get your kids ready for deep thinking.  Since there is a huge argument component, this works for AP Lang just as well.

It was so much fun!  They really reached deep and even the silly suspects (the color red, for instance) were vehemently fought for by their arresting officers.  How this would work in a lower level class, I am not sure.  I can only vouch for this in an AP class setting.  Try it and let me know how it worked in your class! 

MC Speed Training

 Whether it is in my AP Lit class or my Standard Inclusion English II class, I have a standardized test at the end of the course to prepare them for.  For my English II, we are not concerned with speed, but for my AP students, there is a fairly short time frame they must adhere to.  So I thought I would give them a curve ball for yesterday's Multiple Choice Monday challenge.

I did not take this one for a grade.  Instead I put them into groups.  On the board I had 1-20 listed, each with A B C D E beside it.  I gave each group a different color wet erase marker and told them that they have two reading passages and 20 questions total.  Each group can send one member to the board to circle an answer choice.  Only one member from that group can come up at a time and no team member can answer more than one question at a time.  They are welcome to use their group for help in picking the right answer choice.  The catch?

• Since they are writing in wet erase marker, once they have claimed that answer, they cannot go back to change it.
• Only on team can claim a letter for any particular question.

This means that the group must decide on speed vs. precision, or rather, what combination of the two they will use.  If they focus too much on speed, they are likely to take too many wrong answers.  If they take too much time on precision, then they risk other teams grabbing the correct answer before their turn.  

The board soon looked like this:

After all teams were satisfied that they had answered all they could answer, we went over the questions and answers per usual, but this time, prizes were are stake.  In this case, they are playing a quarter-long game, so every correct answer gave their team extra points.

They had a lot of fun and the we added time pressure without grade stress, so I feel like it turned out to be a useful exercise.  Its not one I would do more than once, but it shook up the multiple choice practice and got them excited, so I count it as a win!

Multiple Choice Monday: Racehorse

I borrowed this idea from someone else, but for the life of me, I do not know who created the idea.  Here's the the unsung extreme teacher out there!

This assignment was done in my AP Lit class, but it works just as well in any class that works with multiple choice reading passage questions (AP Lang, English classes with standardized state tests, SAT/ACT prep, etc.)

Students picked names for their horses and we were off to the races!

TLDR Rules: Students are put into groups and work together to get multiple choice questions correct.  Each correct answer moves their horse up a slot.  Each wrong answer moves the teacher's horse up a slot (limit three slots per question).  First to arrive at the finish line gets prizes.

More details are provided on the presentation slides I set up.  You are welcomed to copy it for yourself - no charge!

https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/111Xcu8tpFYVGfWsyOMUfLbazz1SbqoLl0OSbB_ooW-c/edit#slide=id.p

I would love to know any tweaks you make to make this a better experience for your students!

Plato: The Republic

One of the text books approved by the College Board for AP Language and Composition is Jay Henrichs's Thank You for Arguing: What Aristotle, Lincoln, and Homer Simpson Can Teach Us about the Art of Persuasion.  You can get your own copy here.

In the second chapter ("2. Set Your Goals: Cicero's Lightbulb"), he mentions a 1974 National Lampoon issue that has a parody of Plato's Republic. That set me down a rabbit hole to find it.  Surely it had to be somewhere on the World Wide Web, right?

After some digging, I finally found The Internet Archive's download of the ENTIRE run of National Lampoon.  I didn't particularly want the entire run, but it was an all of nothing thing.  So I spent the 6 hours downloading this file so that I could get a total of 6 pages of comic.  The issue it appears in is their Stupid Issue.

Once I read the parody mentioned, I was rather disappointed.  I figured I might find some use for in my class, but I just might not be high-brow enough for the humor.  Maybe if I liked Plato more.  

So I figured that somewhere out there, there was someone who was using this book for their AP Lang class and they were curious about the comic.  So, to that end, here is only the comic:

https://docs.google.com/document/d/1XEnbr2MetwmfAiHl2bgKFq-J4B_kHqyjVSLK0FiPjUA/edit?usp=sharing

And here is where you can download the entire run if you are so inclined:

https://archive.org/details/NationalLampoon_201812

Whichever you decide to do, have fun with it!  And if you find a way to make use of that in your class, I would certainly like to hear it!  That was a lot of work for nothing!  :)