Poetry Study Goals

1) Learn to better understand the main topic of poems
2) Learn to better understand the colorful language used in poems
3) Be able to identify patterns in poems
4) Be able to identify the type of poem
5) Learn to recognize the tone of the author

The practice problems in Peterson's AP English helped me realize that my biggest problem with answering poem-based questions is identifying the main idea. Attributing to this is the colorful language that is used in poetry. Since I have difficulty understanding the wording, it is hard for me to grasp what the author talking about. I also noticed that I struggled to identify the type of poem and the line patterns because I do not know how to fully differentiate between them. Because of this, it would be a very helpful goal for me to memorize the properties of patterns and styles. The final type of question that I noticed I was having a lot of difficulty with was recognizing the author/speaker's tone. For example, when asked about direct references made by the speaker's tone in the practice questions I had to make educated guesses through elimination because of my lacking ability to determine the tone.

Diagnostic Test

The diagnostic test from Peterson's AP English was quite different than I had expected it to be. Originally I assumed (foolishly, apparently) that the questions would be mostly based on the novels that we will be reading with little emphasis on other literary topics. Because of this assumption, I was very surprised to find that all of the questions were based on passages in the test itself and that only one of those passages came from a novel. Other than being taken off-guard by the emphasis on other sources of literature, I did not find the questions themselves to be extremely surprising. Most of the questions were very similar to what I've seen in the past--what type of poem is this, what does this represent/mean, etc. What frustrated me the most about the diagnostic test was how difficult it was for me. This is probably because I haven't taken the class yet, but it was still incredibly irritating to me that I was having so much trouble selecting the best answer. In many cases I felt that either that multiple answers were equally correct, or that none of them were quite fitting for the question being asked.