Tuesday, February 3, 2009

Tuesday, 2/3/2009

AP ENGLISH

Homework Due
  • We turned in "Home Burial" RJ Part II.  You left your notebooks with me.  I'll return them to you mañana.

Big Screen Writing Workshop
  • We went over the AP Writing Rubric to make sure we all know what we're working towards in each essay we write.
  • We workshopped Tina's and Heath's--they were kind enough to volunteer their essay.  We commented on how they were doing on each of the rubric requirements, and we suggested ways they might rearrange sentences, delete words, etc, to make the essay more effective.
  • Thank you guys again for putting your essays up on the Big Screen!

Frankenstein
  • We looked at the original 1818 cover for the novel.
  • We talked about Prometheus in some detail, and we took notes in our green packet.
  • We touched on Milton's Paradise Lost.
  • We introduced the idea of intertextuality, the way one piece of writing can "talk" to another.

Homework
  • Make sure both your Minimalism and your Poetry Compare/Contrast essays are in the Student Volume in the AP folder.  If you've already completed those tasks, you have no homework for tomorrow.  :-)

CREATIVE WRITING

Writing Lessons
  • Different groups of people use different vocabularies:  we tried matching animals to their group names on page 23 with "A Bunch of ...."
  • Phrases the are on the cutting edge of cool fall out of favor eventually, though some may surface years later and again be considered hip slang:  we read "Hasta la Vista, Catchprases" on pages 24-5, and each group presented a short skit to show the slang phrase on context.
  • Words matter:  if the English language was dying, and you could only preserve twenty words, which words would they be, and why?  We talked about page 26, and then we got dictionaries and spent about fifteen minutes jotting down words for our "save" list.

Homework
  • Death of Language--due FRIDAY when you walk in the door.  For an excellent grade, your responses have to be as thoughtful and detailed as the ones on page 26.
TURBO-ADVANCED CREATIVE WRITING

Organization
  • Miranda and Sara were kind enough to pass out papers and folders, so we had a folder log-in at the first of class.
Writing Reminder
  • What is connotation?
  • What is denotation?
  • We read and discussed page 18
  • We looked at two poems about roaches (pages 19-20)and discussed how different they were in tone because of the word choice the poets used.  
  • We took the Connotation and Denotation Quiz on page 21 as a class and discussed our answers.

Big Screen Sharing
  • We shared the bad poems--and they were incredibly awful!  They stunk!
  • Mike read his suspense story--it was realistic AND suspenseful.  :-)
  • Ryan read his "...Dream" poem, and we gave him comments.
Timed Journal #3
We typed for fifteen minutes on ONE of the following:
  • The Best Year (best year of your life so far and why)
  • Tiny or Immense (decision you made--big or small--that you regret; what was it, and why do you regret it?)
Homework:  None

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