The Lottery 

5. (a) Mr. Summer's attitude toward the ritual stoning seem to be without sympathy. He is accustomed to this ritual due to the fact that he has been the one leading it in the previous years. He holds a significant amount of power in the village and has the most control. His attitude toward the ritual is impersonal.
(b) Old Man Warner supports the rituals. His reaction to Mr. Adams speaking of villages in the north contemplating on giving up the ritual reveals that Old Man Warner's attitude toward the ritual is encouraging. "'Some places have already quit lotteries," Mrs. Adams said. "Nothing but trouble in that," Old Man Warner said stoutly. "Pack of young fools.'" Old Man Warner has participated in 77 lotteries and believes in keeping things the way they are. He accepts the way things are without question because that's the way it's always been.
(c) Mr. and Mrs. Adams seem to hold the same attitude as most people in the village. They participate without questioning it. Their opinion toward the lottery is not much stated. "They do say," Mr. Adams said to Old Man Warner, who stood next to him, "that over in the north village they're talking of giving up the lottery." This slightly hints at Mr. Adams wondering about something beyond the village.
(d) Mrs. Hutchinson's attitude toward the lottery is that is it unfair. "'It wasn't fair,'" Tessie said." She already appears to stand out from the crowd before the lottery, because of the fact that she arrives late.
(e) The villager's attitude toward the lottery is serious. Everyone except Mrs. Hutchinson arrives on time which indicates that they take it very seriously.
- Mrs. Hutchinson's attitude most closely reflects the point of the story, because she's the only one who seems to display any opposition against it. The story expresses the dangers of blindly following a tradition, and Mrs. Hutchinson, an innocent civilian was killed because of it.

6. The story reveals that it is human nature to sometimes follow a tradition, or believe certain things without questioning it. People have authority figures tell them what's true and not true, and some will just believe it without question. The mindset that "that's the way things have always been" is very dangerous because it closes all the doors to questioning a tradition.

8. "Be a good sport, Tessie," Mrs. Delacroix called, and Mrs. Graves said, "All of us took the same chance."
     "Shut up, Tessie," Bill Hutchinson said.
The fact that Mrs. Hutchinson's friends and her own husband don't seem to show any emotional reaction toward her fear and fate shows that the story is presented in an objective standpoint. The story does not get into any of the character's thoughts, and it is told in a narrating voice outside the story.


A Rose For Emily

1. A clear chronology of the story would indicate the orders of the different sections being, 2, 3, 4, 1, 5.

2. Emily Grierson is described as

Xin Phong
AP Literature
8th Period


Question 3: pg 175

  Sometimes I can still hear the flames and feel Maggie's arms sticking to me in an irksome manner, with her hair tangled in clumsiness, and her dirty dress falling off her in dreadful flakes. Frozen, her eyes appeared stretched open, unable to take much action, like an animal with undeveloped insticts. And Dee. I see her preciously standing off under the tree, barely safe from harm. She had an intense look on her face as she watched the last bits of the house disintegrate in the merciless flames. Why don't you get out of here? I wanted to ask her. She must've felt discomfort from the sight of our house, unworthy of her magnitude of excellence.
I used to think she wasn't comfortable with Maggie's uneasy presence too. But that was before we raised money, the church and me, to send her to school in Augusta to fullfill her dreams in the pursuit of education. She used to read to us, with hope; projecting words, truths, and revealing the spectrum of the lives of others upon Maggie and I, sitting confined underneath her potential. She embraced us in an air of reality, blessed us with an abundance of knowledge that was nice to know.



I ommitted some words that were insignificant and neutral in describing Dee in a positive light. I included positive words such as, hope, truths, embraced, etc. to portray Dee in a positive way. As for the mother, I rewrote the passage, but remained in the mother's point of view. Her feelings toward Maggie as annoyed, and a hint of shame makes her a bad mother. When describing Maggie in the scene of the burning house, words such as clumsiness, dirty, irksome, and dreadful are used to give a sense of negativity toward Maggie.

Question 6.

Barbara Burhman's final question in the story, "Life After High School" by Joyce Carol Oates was an appropiate closure because it is a reflection and direct unfolding of one of Barbara's defining core characteristics and how she really truly feels about Zachary: cold-hearted indifference. Throughout the story, it can be inferred that Barbara really did not value or care about her relationship with Zach. On page 579, it says "Sunny's secret vanity must have been what linked them." This sentence proves that one of the reasons Barabara continued to interact with Zach was because she was flattered by his admiration towards her, and it also made her feel better about herself. It also gave her a false believe that she was succeeding in helping Zachary believe in God, which also made her feel better about herself. Barbara did not even notice when Zachary was away from school for a couple days which shows that his existence did not have much significance to her. After Zachary's death, Barabara appeared to be going through a grieving period, not  because she was depressed over the fact that Zachary was gone from her life or that she had missed his presence, but because she felt bad because it was her fault. Zachary's death was what it took for Barabara to kill her facade.It made her feel as if her facade did more harm than good. The afromentioned are good examples of how much selfishness Barbara had in her and because of that, she is a cold-hearted person and is only affected by Zachary's death because it affects her image, and how much guilt it shot her with. Never after Zachary's death did Barbara ever mentions something positive about Zachary as a human being. The closing line, "After an hour or so Barbara Burhman leaned across the table, as at one of her professional meetings, to ask, in a tone of intellectual curiousity, "What do you think Zachary planned to do with that clothesline?" confirms all speculations, interpretations, and assumptions of Barbara's cold-hearted nature, as fact. Even after her grieving period was over, Barbara speaks of Zachary's death as if she had not emotional, or personal connection with him. To ask the question she asked in a "tone of intellectual curiosity" shows that, Barbara, even after years shows the same detachment which proves this to be one of her defining characteristics.

Xin Phong

AP Literature

Pick a theory, any theory

Well I guess if you’re going to have to ask me to pick a theory, I’d have to go with theory two because it says in theory two that what matters is what the students actually learn. This is because I feel that nowadays, most people I encounter are worried about getting into the top colleges, not because they’ll best accommodate the student’s individual growth, but because of its credentials. I witness too many people, people close to me, who sacrifice hours and hours of their time doing things like extracurriculars, volunteering, etc. just to put a little spice to their college resumes. I’m not saying it’s a bad thing. It’s great volunteering to help the homeless and it’s great joining school clubs and all that, but what’s your motive behind it? What happened to genuinely doing something because you are passionate about it? Kudos to those who still manage to do that nowadays. It’s sometimes difficult to focus on what you’re most passionate about when you have UC recommended courses to fullfill, and a bunch of graduation requirement courses to endure, and that’s not even everything. So theory 2 says what matters is what students learn. That should be what education is for people. Something you benefit intellectually from. Not some piece of paper you acquire as a ticket to whatever dream job you want.


There are so many things in this piece of text that I just wrote that you can pick out and argue against because I feel like I couldn’t elaborate on it well enough and not exceed one page. *cringe*