week 2
green/white 1 august 24, 25
Good morning! I hope you had a great weekend.
Our goal today is to conduct two discussions in relation to your work from this past weekend. Today’s a good chance to show off your discussion chops. REMEMBER: We want to yield to other students if we’ve had our say, and talking over Zoom requires special patience and careful listening to make sure we’re not speaking over anyone. Let’s thrive in this environment, proving it can be done well.
First, I’ll break you into groups for 10 minutes to share with two other students what you chose to write about. Keep track of what your peers had to say as I might ask you to share what the others in your group said. When you return, we’ll begin a large group discussion, trying to cover as many of the listed subjects as we can.
After, please post your paragraph here next to your name.
Then, we’ll turn to the PD James article, “Murder Most Foul”, focusing mostly on what she calls “the problems of construction”. How does Christie’s novel hold up? Let’s try out that Whiteboard, shall we?
Finally, I’ll set your Detective Fiction Project, due, at the earliest, September 28.
HOMEWORK FOR OUR NEXT MEETING:
Read through the Detective Fiction Project doc carefully and think about which of the options you might enjoy doing most. You have little time before committing to one option, so I’d like you to waste none in getting started in the selection process.
flex wednesday august 26
green/white 2 august 27, 28
Let’s begin today by doing an exercise called “How I Knew”.
NEXT: How did you do with the TS Eliot work I asked you to complete asynchronously on Wednesday? For which of TS Eliot’s requirements for a successful detective novel might The Murder of Roger Ackroyd receive a failing grade?
Then we’ll return to your paragraphs from the other day, learning how to take your idea and turn it into a formal topic sentence. Here’s my body paragraph primer for freshmen. Keep your copy handy because we’ll turn to it throughout the year.
What is a body ¶? Don't worry. This is just a crash course. We'll have lots of time during the next cycle to go into greater detail about writing thesis statements and body ¶s.
In next week’s second class you will write an in-class body ¶ on The Murder of Roger Ackroyd. You may use your book and any handwritten notes you have. You will need a charged iPad, too. Have this template with MLA formatting ready to go. Make sure you know how to upload to turnitin.com. We'll have practiced in class.
HOMEWORK FOR OUR NEXT MEETING:
Study for the vocabulary quiz.
Reread your brainstorming paragraph from this past weekend. Are you still happy with the idea? Do you want to change your subject? Either way, it’s fine. Change or keep what you have. But by our next class I’d like you to write a topic sentence like the ones we went through today that states the purpose of your paragraph. What is it you want to show in a revised version of that paragraph? Bring that topic sentence to our next class.
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schola brevis august 12
Welcome, young men. Who am I? Who are you?
PLEASE COMPLETE BEFORE OUR FIRST CLASS:
A Friendly Kubus PSA: Write down on a piece of paper all of your log-in details for each of the following. Remembering how to log in is always your responsibility. The more you know…
1. Register on Turnitin. The Class ID is 25783440. The Class Enrollment Key is Magis. Please use your full first name, last name, and mail.strakejesuit email.
2. Make sure you have the Quizlet app, Notability, Google Drive, and Google Docs loaded on your iPad.
3. Download Socrative Student from the App Store on you iPad. You’ll use this occasionally to take quizzes.
4. Join my Peergrade course by navigating here and entering the code XRQXNM. Please use your full first name, last name, and mail.strakejesuit email.
5. Join my Flipgrid course by navigating here, clicking “Join with Google”, and entering your @mail.strakejesuit e-mail and password.
6. Join my NoRedInk course by navigating here, clicking sign up as a student, and creating a student account with full first name, last name, and @mail.strakejesuit e-mail.
7. How many of the above authors can you identify? Impress me next time.
Problems with any of the above? Don’t panic. Keep trying to figure it out yourself, and if you’re still struggling, we’ll work at it together next time.
week 1
green/white 1 august 17, 18
Glad you’re back. I like to begin my class by giving you the lens questions through which we’ll read most texts this year. These questions also happen to be the essay prompts for your fall final exam. I’ll tell you two stories, and for each, I’ll give you the questions that naturally derive from their theme.
We’ll also talk today about the purpose of an English class as I see it, what you’ll be doing this year in my class, and the best ways to succeed.
What’s most important to me? What do I value the most in my students?
We’ll dive deeper into policies of the class and what’s expected of you.
“The Appointment in Samarra”
To what extent do the characters in the stories we read have agency or personal determination, that is, an ability to dictate what happens to them in their story?
“The Scorpion and the Frog”
So, if characters do have agency and can determine their fate, is it in their nature to act how they act, or can they change their ways?
HOMEWORK FOR OUR NEXT MEETING:
1. Review ALL of the policy page. Familiarize yourself with how the class works. Look through the website to see what's available. You and a parent must indicate you have read and now understand all the policies of the course by clicking this link to a Google form.
2. Prepare for your summer reading quiz. The quiz will take you approximately 20 minutes.
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green/white 2 august 20, 21
Thanks for playing, gentlemen. Follow this procedure: In your breakout room, open the quiz (You’ll have to find it first). >>> Copy the PDF to Notability. >>> Use Notability to NEATLY complete each question on the quiz. One student in each group will submit the quiz. Make sure each group member’s name is on the quiz, or he will not get credit for having taken it. >>> Save and send to Google Drive. Double check to make sure your notes came through to Drive. >>> Log in to turnitin.com and post your PDF to the assignment portal. Do NOT assume you’ve submitted the quiz until you get a confirmation e-mail from turnitin.com. Congratulations! You’ve intrepidly accepted, braved, and vanquished my first challenge of the year.
Notes:
(1) Zoom gives you the ability to share your screen with the other members of your group in the breakout room; work together.
(2) For the weak: You may use your book if you feel you need a crutch to lean on. For the bold and brave: Keep that book closed; you got this.
(3) You have 20 minutes. Work efficiently. I’ll come into each room to check on your progress.
(4) You may use your hive mind and your book. That’s it. DO NO GOOGLING. BE MORAL, MEN. BE MORAL MEN.
After taking the summer reading quiz, I’ll ask you to hold up a sample page from your text so I can see your annotations. I’ll share with you my annotation doc and talk about what I think effective annotations will be.
Here are your first vocabulary words for the year. The quiz will be either Monday or Tuesday, August 31/ September 1.
We’ll finish the class by jumping into a discussion about some of the big ideas raised in The Murder of Roger Ackroyd:
IDENTITY
OUR NEED TO PROTECT OURSELVES FROM THE TRUTH
THE POWER OF LOGIC
THE LIMITATIONS OF LOGIC
TRUST AND BETRAYAL
THE WEAKNESS OF THE WILL
RELYING ON EVIDENCE OR INTUITION
HOMEWORK FOR OUR NEXT MEETING:
(1) Choose one of the big ideas above you feel the most comfortable exploring in greater detail.
(2) Type a short ¶ (about half a page, double-spaced) that explores where you see that idea coming up in The Murder of Roger Ackroyd. I'll ask you to copy/paste this paragraph into a shared doc at the beginning of next class.
(3) Open this essay, “Murder Most Foul” by PD James, in Notability. Read the essay as best you can, and we’ll use it as a discussion starter during our next class. Some of it might be hard and some of its references might seem obscure, but do your best. It’s all I’ll ever ask of you.
what's due?
August 20 / 21 - The Murder of Roger Ackroyd Quiz
August 31 / September 1 - The Murder of Roger Ackroyd Vocabulary Quiz Manero’s QUIZLET
September 11 - The Murder of Roger Ackroyd Body Paragraph Revision
September 28 - Detective Fiction Project
docs to have handy
OUR VIRTUAL CLASSROOM CODE
Each time we’d have a regularly scheduled class, you’ll follow this link and enter code:
640-291-5956
current text to have daily
nEXT text
STUDYING detective fiction
What Makes Great Detective Fiction
How Agatha Christie Hides her Plot Secrets in Plain Sight
ONGOING Extra Credit
Required reading can at times feel like drudgery. And while it's important to do the reading I set for the class, I fully recognize that you'd rather have a say in what it is we read. Unfortunately the freshman curriculum has little student choice built in, so your ongoing extra credit gives you the opportunity to read an outside text in your own time at some point during the semester. I'm very happy to reward you with additional course credit if you take it upon yourself to read a text outside of class and meet with me to discuss it. A few things:
(1) This must be a text you've never read before.
(2) It should be imaginative and of recognized literary merit. The text must be approved beforehand.
(3) The amount of credit awarded is variable depending on the chosen text and how our follow up conversation goes.
(4) While you may read as much as you'd like, I will only award extra credit once per semester.
enjoying literature
“In the realm of narrative psychology, a person’s life story is not a Wikipedia biography of the facts and events of a life, but rather the way a person integrates those facts and events internally—picks them apart and weaves them back together to make meaning. This narrative becomes a form of identity, in which the things someone chooses to include in the story, and the way she tells it, can both reflect and shape who she is. A life story doesn’t just say what happened, it says why it was important, what it means for who the person is, for who they’ll become, and for what happens next.”
