Informative | BentonEnglish.com

Welcome to a new school year! I’ve posted my classes’ agendas, and you can expect this on a weekly basis (usually done on Thursday afternoon for the week which follows). Please refer to the key to the left to make clearest sense of the agenda. You can also click on the schedule for a larger zoom-able image of the board. Below, you’ll find downloadable versions of this week’s in-class handouts along with a few other helpful documents.

Pre-IB English 2: Syllabus, Summer Assignment, Colormarking #1

AP Literature: Syllabus, Summer Assignment, Discussion Prep, Jane Eyre E-text, Jane Eyre Journal

AP Research: Syllabus, Summer Assignment (PREP Tasks #1-3), EBSCO Host, Gale Databases (password is pinellas), JSTOR, Google Scholar, Purdue OWL, Annotated Bibliography Template, CRAAP Test, Course Credit Policies / High-Scoring Student Papers: Mixed #1; Qual #1, Qual #2, Qual #3, Qual #4, Qual #5; Quant #1, Quant #2, Quant #3

Are you uncomfortable with ambiguity? It’s a common condition, but a highly problematic one. The compulsion to quell that unease can inspire snap judgments, rigid thinking, and bad decision-making.

Fortunately, new research suggests a simple antidote for this affliction: Read more literary fiction.

A trio of University of Toronto scholars, led by psychologist Maja Djikic, report that people who have just read a short story have less need for what psychologists call “cognitive closure.” Compared with peers who have just read an essay, they expressed more comfort with disorder and uncertainty—attitudes that allow for both sophisticated thinking and greater creativity.

“Exposure to literature,” the researchers write in the Creativity Research Journal, “may offer a (way for people) to become more likely to open their minds.”

Djikic and her colleagues describe an experiment featuring 100 University of Toronto students. After arriving at the lab and providing some personal information, the students read either one of eight short stories or one of eight essays. The fictional stories were by authors including Wallace Stegner, Jean Stafford, and Paul Bowles; the non-fiction essays were by equally illustrious writers such as George Bernard Shaw and Stephen Jay Gould.

Afterwards, each participant filled out a survey measuring their emotional need for certainty and stability. They expressed their agreement or disagreement with such statements as “I don’t like situations that are uncertain” and “I dislike questions that can be answered in many different ways.” Continue reading →