Second Pep Talk Email for AP Lang Students 2016-17
This is the story about a boy, a bowl of black eyed peas, and a revelation.
Imagine, if you, will a youth who spent the first sixteen years of his life in Florida. Not inner-state Florida where the ocean breezes can't penetrate. I'm talking about the gulf coast. The water is calm and a consistent 84 degrees. The breezes blow in and the salt in the air sticks to every exposed surface of your skin. So close to the water that the sounds of shrimping boats meant it was almost lunchtime. A place where children have read about this thing called snow the way you've read about this thing called the Revolutionary War. Words on the page. But in reality? It never falls below 60 degrees. And such a temperature calls for a fairly sturdy jacket.
This boy though has a strange fear. Call it irrational or unjustified or whatever. But he fears, deep down inside, the taste of lima beans. He's eaten them on occasion, when he was forced to eat them. He follows rules after all. And maybe "eat" is too loose a word. He places them in his mouth and chews the organic matter knowing that it's important to someone that he do this. But he doesn't like it. Not one bit. Might as well be green eggs and ham.
One day during the last year he lives in Florida he's invited over to dinner at a friend's house. The family is much more affluent: open air Florida house on the shore. There's a boat dock out back. There's wealth here. And this boy knows that an uncontestable rule when one eats over at another's house is that one is expected to eat the food put before him. Much of the dinner is wonderful: chicken, corn, a side dish that he's never had before. But also... there they are. A bowl of them. The bowl is beautiful china, like the rest of the dishes on the table. It's off-center on the table, closer to the boy than the rest of the food. The black eyed peas that fill the bowl practically stare at him. Black EYED peas after all. And they're not just looking at him; they're staring. With that one beady EYE. They know - THEY KNOW - he can't refuse. When his friend's mother offers a spoonful the boy will say yes because it's understood. It's custom. And to transgress custom is unthinkable.
So he accepts and spends most of the meal eating around them, hedging his bets. What can he do? Is there a way out of this? Maybe the host parents will leave the table early and he can ditch them in the trash when no one is looking? No such luck: they stay and talk the entire time. Soon his plate nearly is empty of everything else except the one-eyed devil creature of absolute doom. So here it goes. Time to bite the pea, as it were.
This isn't a Dr. Seuss story. The boy didn't suddenly develop an improbably love for this strangest of all vegetables. He didn't take a bite and rise from his seat ready to engage in impromptu song and dance. But here's what did happen: he ate the black eyed peas. And as he combined them with the other foods on the plate (admittedly to dull the flavor and texture) he discovered that in a tiny way they complemented some of the taste of the chicken and the corn and the unidentified other side dish that at this point will probably never be named. The point is that while it wasn't suddenly ice cream and cake it also wasn't really that horrible.
What's more is that the boy learned combining foods that he hadn't previously considered combining paid dividends. Years later he would recall this incident as he tried his wife's beans and rice and found, to his surprise, they were magnificent together. It was risk-taking and creative combining all in the same sweep.
Tomorrow I will place something on the desk in front of you that will probably simulate the feeling I had all those years ago when I saw those black eyed peas before me. Maybe the prompt will be easier than you expect; maybe harder. Maybe it will be a unique combination of rhetorical flourish that allows you to see something about the author or about good writing that you know you have read about but hadn't really seen with your own eyes. But like this Florida boy who moved north when he was sixteen and discovered, whoa, snow was, like, real you might find that good writing pops up in the most unexpected of places.
The point of this email, though, is this: good writing involves risk taking and creative combining. Should you build a paragraph about just tone? Or just diction? Or just pathos? I won't say that's a bad idea but what if you did something more interesting? What if you wrote about diction by emulating the author's style? What if instead of calling it ethos you called it an appeal to conscience? That's what it is, isn't it? Maybe the writer of the prompt doesn't have a conscience at all and you're horrified by the argument he or she makes. Can you call that out? Here's the better question: who has the power to STOP you from calling that out?
Tomorrow has not been written. Your ability to craft an articulate and meaningful analysis of an author's work does not depend on the score you got two weeks ago. It doesn't even depend on what you think you knew yesterday.
Your score will be a result of opening your mind wide and creatively combining all those rhetorical tools. And then?
Take a bite. You might be surprised at the result.
