Connor's Corner

          As I read through the play Fences by August Wilson, my opinion of the main character Troy changed from a powerful teacher to a villain as the play continued. When the play opens, Troy returns from a night out on the town with his friend Bono. He has just gotten paid and wants to spend time with his wife and convince his son Cory to get a job at the store. While he often illustrated his points offensively and harshly, I didn’t think of Troy as an antagonist or obstacle. He was simply trying to do what he thought was right for his son. However, as the play progressed, new details about Troy began to come to light and the motivation behind his choices was revealed. During his youth, Troy had no mother. His father worked on a sharecropping plantation while trying to take care of Troy and his 11 siblings. One day while getting “cozy” with a girl, Troy’s father appeared and beat Troy with a leather strap. While Troy thought that his father didn’t want ...

  Connor Franklin When I signed up for AP Lang last spring, I had a pretty good idea of what I was getting myself into. I had always been fairly good at writing essays and analyzing texts, so I wasn’t too concerned about the difficulty or how the course would challenge me. As I had come to understand it at that point, AP classes weren’t exactly difficult in their material but rather challenging in that they gave students tons of material to memorize. However, walking into my first day of Lang in the fall of 2023, I found something completely different. The class didn’t focus on learning the best test-taking strategies or writing the most essays we could. The class wasn’t based on objective truths, but introduced discussions where we would try to get a handle on the “best” truth yet never seemed to find one that we all agreed on. In AP Lang I found myself participating in lively debates on all matters of things both related to test material or, - if Mr. Barron felt like it - somet...