Advanced Placement Tutoring

Is your child studying AP United States History, AP English, AP US Government or preparing for the SAT subject matter exams in social science? I can help your child maximize their potential and reach their educational goals. I offer rigorous tutoring in objective (multiple choice) and subjective (essay writing) skill sets which will propel your students to the head of the class.

My teaching responsibilities have included planning and teaching Advanced Placement United States History, Advanced Placement United States Government, US History, World History and Economics. I am also a reader for ETS for the Advanced Placement United States History exam. I hold Bachelors and Masters Degrees from New York University where I graduated at the top of my class and earning the prestigious Founder's Day Award. I earned my California Clear Credential with a CLAD emphasis from the UCLA TEACHLA program.

I am confident in my teaching abilities and I am fully prepared for the rigors of today's urban classroom. I am currently a Teacher Fellow at several universities and continue to attend various teacher institutes sponsored by the UCLA History-Geography Project, Cal State LA, USC and the University of California at Santa Barbara, as life-long learning is a necessary prerequisite for success in the classroom. Prior to my secondary experiences, I was privileged to lecture at New York City Technical College and New York University where I was assigned classes in Advertising Account Management and Media History during my graduate semesters.

Administrators and school sites welcomed. I am available for after school tutoring and professional development of your advanced placement staff. Let's change those 1's and 2's into 4's and 5's

Your investment in your child's education: $50.00 per hour; $125.00 per 3 hours per week or $425.00 per month based on 3 hours per week. Books and study materials included.

Academic Preparation:
MA New York University 2000 Culture/Communications and Media
BA New York University 1998 Social Sciences/Organizational Development
AAS New York University 1997 Business Management
Teaching Credential UCLA 2004 Secondary Education/CLAD

Courses Taught:

Advanced Placement United States History
Advanced Placement United States Government and Politics
Advanced Placement World History
20th Century United States History
Economics
Creative Writing
Media History and Advertising Account Management
Advertising Account Management

Academic Proficiencies:

• Curriculum Design and Development
• Differentiated Instruction
• Cooperative Learning
• Student Motivation
• Interactive Learning
• Classroom Management
• Student-Centered Learning
• Multicultural Awareness
• Student Assessment
• Whole Group Learning
• Talented and Gifted instruction
• Academic Research and Development
• Advanced Placement United States History Reader

Honors, Prizes, and Awards:

• Founder's Award -- New York University, 1998
• Inductee, Alpha Sigma Lambda -- National Honor Society, New York University chapter 1996
• New York University Dean's List 1995-2000

Professional Organizations:
• Foundation for Teaching Economics -- Member
• Organization of American Historians -- Member
• UCLA History-Geography Project -- Teacher Fellow
• UCSB History-Geography Project -- Teacher Fellow
• USC-CALIS Teacher Leadership Program -- Teacher Fellow
• World History Association -- Member

Final Assignments

Complete blog posts. Each student should have 112 blog posts. Each student is responsible for a minimum of 25 comments on others blogs in the cadre.

Each student is also responsible for an Autobiographical Personal Essay. The work will be between 500 and750 words. All papers are to be laid out with one inch margins, written in 10 or 12 point font, and double-spaced.

Each student will also write and submit a Short Story. Stories can be written in the genre of student’s choice. Short Stories will be between 500 and 1,000 words. Again, the standard technical layout applies. Be sure to include the following information as an attachment to your story:

Point of View—the main character’s/narrator’s POV.
Character Analysis—identify each character (i.e. gender, strengths, weaknesses, purpose etc.)
Plot/Central Conflict—what is the central conflict/issue of the story?
Setting—where/when does the story take place?
End/Resolution—how is the conflict resolved

All work is due on January 19, 2011; no exceptions.

Setting

Setting as the World

Setting is the environment in which a story takes place. A story’s setting can have both physical as well as psychological effects on the action and characters of the story. How much differently might a story turn out if it were set in a crowded city instead of on a deserted island?

Your routine, your neighborhood, your take on home, history, climate, and the cosmos are unique, like your voice, and inseparable from your voice. As a writer you need to be alert to your own vision and to create for us, even make strange to us, the world you think most familiar.

Description has earned a bad rap with overlong, self-indulgent eulogies to wallflowers, furniture, or even alien planets. Bur setting involves everything that supports and impinges on your characters. The props of the world artifacts and architecture, infrastructure, books, food, fabrics, tools and technology—create and sustain identity. People behaving in relation to their surroundings define both space and time, and reveal much more.

Assignment:

Draw the floor plan of the first house you remember living in. Take a mental tour through the house, pausing (and marking on the floor plan) where significant occurred. Walk through again, making a list of these events. Pick one of them and write about it. Pay attention to the setting and the atmosphere of the event. How does your relation to the space, light, weather, walls, furniture, and objects affect what you are doing and feeling? Explain in detail, does the space represent safety or confinement? 

Memoir and Personal Essay

A memoir is a story retrieved from the author’s memory, with the writer as protagonist—the “I” remembering and commenting on events described in the essay. Memoir tends to place the emphasis on the story, and the “point” is likely to emerge, as it does in fiction, largely from the events and characters themselves, rather than the through the author’s speculation and reflection.

The personal essay has its origin in something that has happened in the writer’s life, but it may be something that happened yesterday afternoon, or it may represent an area of interest deliberately explored, and it is likely to give rise to reflection or intellectual exploration. In his book, The Art of the Personal Essay, Philip Lopate refers to the personal essay as, “…the drive toward candor and self-exposure.

Assignment: Write narrative style essays for the following prompts as indicated:

Memoir

People often say “Don’t judge a book by its cover.” Describe a time when you misjudged someone based on his or her appearance or when someone misjudged you.

Personal Essay

The way a person handles disappointment reveals a great deal about what is important to him or her. Tell about a time in your life when you confronted disappointment and how you handled it.

The essays should be at least 250 words but no more than 750 words. Essays are due Wednesday, November 10^th at the beginning of class. Also, please post them on your blogs.

Figures of Speech

English is a language unusually rich in tropes or figures of speech—that is, expressions not meant to be taken literally, but as standing for something related in some way (the word trope comes from a Greek word meaning to twist or turn). Tropes almost invariably involve an image. The number and variety of common figures of speech make English difficult to learn as a foreign language, but also makes it a fertile ground for creative writing. (Notice that fertile ground here is a trope, specifically a metaphor in which the language is compared to soil.)

There are many different kinds of figures of speech, but there are five major tropes are usually considered to be:

Metonymy – in which one thing is represented by another thing associate with it, as in all crowns of Europe (where crowns stands for kings)

Synecdoche – in which a part stands for the whole, as in all hands on deck (where hands stands for men)

Personification – in which human characteristics are bestowed on anything non human, as in the breathing city or the gentle breeze

Metaphor – a comparison as in the woman is a rose.

Simile – a comparison as in the woman is like a rose.

Though these are five of the most frequently used figures of speech in English, you may be familiar with others, such as hyperbole, which is extreme exaggeration, and oxymoron, which links two contradictory words. And who hasn’t enjoyed groaning at a pun? In medieval and Renaissance rhetoric, dozens of tropes were identified, classified, and debate, and skill using these “ornaments” much admired.

Assignment:

Write three (3) poems of two (2) verses each in the following format: The first line consists of an abstraction, plus a verb, plus a place. The second line describes attire. The third line summarizes an action.

Beauty creeps out the window
Wearing nothing but taut bare skin
Leaving a trail of wrinkles behind her.

Hunger yells in the hallway,
Draped in cymbals;
He stomps and shouts, “Hear me now!”

Example by Carrisa Neff

Concrete & Significant Details

Assignment

Writers are frequently advised: show, don’t tell. What this means is that it is crucial to address the senses. Vivid writing contains concrete, significant details.

• ·         Concrete means that there is an image, something that can be seen, heard, smelled, tasted or touched.
• ·         Significant means that the specific image also suggests an abstraction, generalization, or judgment.
• ·         Detail means that there is a degree of focus and specificity.

The notion of detail is important to the image because it moves away from the generalized and toward the particular. For example, creature is a generalized notion, hard to see except in the vaguest way. Animal is still vague; four-legged animal is a little more specific; domestic animal a little more; dog narrows the field; mixed-breed Shepard we can see; old Sammy asleep on the red rug, his haunches twitching in his dream brings the dog into sharp focus in our minds. At the same time this last sentence resonates with the ideas of age and uneasy sleep.  If it said his teeth bared and gnashing in his dream, we’d also guess that old Sam has a capacity for meanness.  Notice how the narrowing specificity of the noun invites active verbs.

Try this:

Begin with the largest general categories you can think of – minerals, food, structures—thing big. Then narrow the categories step by step, becoming more specific until you have  single detailed images. Try it again with the same large categories but narrow in another direction. Can you, without naming a quality, make your images suggest an idea or direct our attitude toward the things you describe?

What is an Image?

An Image is a word or series of words that evokes one or more of the senses. An image appeals to the senses. This is the foundation of imaginative writing. Use abstractions, generalizations and judgments in your writing as we want to envelop the reader into our world of words and help them to see and feel what we see and feel. Human beings are able to communicate largely because we are capable of these kinds of conceptual thinking.
*Abstractions are the names of ideas or concepts, which we cannot in themselves be experienced directly through one or more of our senses, such as intelligence, criticism, love, anger.
*Generalizations can only be vaguely visualized because they include too many of a given group: something, creatures, gym equipment.
*Judgments tell us what to think about something instead of showing it: beautiful, insidious, suspiciously.




Supply the color
What sounds do you hear?
What mood does the picture bring to mind?
What emotion does the picture elicit?
What taste do you remember as you look at the picture?


Imaginative Writing: The Elements of Craft, 3rd Edition, Janet Burroway, Penguin Academics, New York: 2011