Faculty Highlight: Mrs. Robinson

Mrs. Robinson is the AP English Literature and Composition teacher here at Vestavia Hills High School. Before teaching AP Literature at Vestavia, Mrs. Robinson taught AP Language and Composition at Auburn High School for 13 years. She says that going from teaching nonfiction to teaching fiction was a real shift, but since fiction led her to teach in the first, it seemed like teaching AP Literature was where she needed to be.

Growing up, Mrs. Robinson loved school and felt it was a safe place. She fell in love with reading at an early age as well. Her favorite parts of class were always talking about reading. As she got older, she liked to work with young people. She wanted to do something more creative and be able to change things up when she wanted to. She wanted to feel like she was truly helping people. Her parents had always believed she should be a teacher, but she still was not sure. After spending a few summers as a camp counselor, she knew she wanted to be a teacher.

Mrs. Robinson says her favorite part about being a teacher is truly the kids. She enjoys getting a new group of students every year and getting the chance to learn from them. She believes that students now are so knowledgeable in so many areas and is constantly learning from them as much as they are learning from her. The life that her students bring to the classroom make her excited to go to work each day. She recognizes that AP Literature allows her to have upper level conversations with her students that might not get brought up in normal day to day life.

AP English Literature and Composition focuses on fiction based works such as novels, plays, and poetry. In this class, students work to recognize the true themes and the beauty of language that come forth from those imaginative texts. Many of the assignments in this class revolve around analysis writing and intentional writing. In poetry analysis essays students students must think about structure, figurative language, tone, symbols, and theme/message to analyze and understand what the poem as a whole means and what the speaker is saying. The AP Exam consists of two parts: the multiple choice questions and the writing. The multiple choice section is 45% of the exam grade, and the remaining 55% is from the writing section.

To do well in this class, Mrs. Robinson believes you need to be engaged. By being an active participant in your learning, students can go far in developing their writing and reading skills. Mrs. Robinson believes that any student who is willing to put in the work for AP Literature is a prime student for this class. People who are self-motivated, love reading, and willing to work hard to improve their writing are ready to take this class.

If she could add something to the curriculum, Mrs. Robinson says she would love to teach more plays. She would love to teach a play by Tennessee Williams or a book by Toni Morrison. She understands that not everything she loves fits into the curriculum. She says that sometimes real quality literature is hard to teach because of the topics that come up in them. With that in mind, she plans to assign an independent reading assignment, so her students can pick what they want to read.

In addition to teaching AP Literature, Mrs. Robinson is also the sponsor for Poetry Out Loud, a national poetry recitation competition. She first learned about it when teaching at Auburn High School because a colleague of hers ran the program there. There are three categories to participate in: National anthology recitation competition, the state level original poem category, and the state level social challenge original poetry contest. The National anthology recitation competition is the largest one and is the only one that can take you all the way to nationals. For this category, participants select a poem from Poetry Out Loud’s website. Participants must compete by delivering the poem with its true intention, using the right amount of emphasis and annunciation, and with the proper amount of pacing, Participants in this category can go on to regionals, state, and then nationals. In the original poem category, students can write and recite their own poetry. In the social challenge original poetry contest, students write an original poem on what they perceive as a modern social challenge that is faced in society. The idea of Poetry Out Loud is to foster love and awareness of poetry. Mrs. Robinson believes that poetry is a vital art that is healing and that provides wisdom. She wishes more people would experience it regularly. This is only the second year they’ve had the competition, but Mrs. Robinson hopes more students will know about it and participate in it.