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week 4
green/white 1 september 8, 9
Let’s begin with the detective fiction project update. Then let me REITERATE appropriate e-mail behavior.
During our next 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 practice in class.
To continue to prep for this assignment, let’s analyze two more images, a piece of music, and one more quotation.
Image, Music, and Text:
“It was really this last named trait of hers which was causing me these pangs of indecision. Whatever I told Caroline now concerning the demise of Mrs. Ferrars would be common knowledge all over the village within the space of an hour and a half. As a professional man, I naturally aim at discretion. Therefore, I have got into the habit of continually withholding all information possible from my sister. She usually finds out just the same, but I have the moral satisfaction of knowing that I am in no way to blame.”
What might be the sentences of analysis for each of the above?
Here are three sample freshman paragraphs to use as models for your in-class assignment next class:
Please hang back today if you have a missing assignment.
HOMEWORK FOR OUR NEXT MEETING:
Finish your final prep for the in-class paragraph assignment.
Also, be aware of your reading assignment for next week, found below. It’s long, so you may want to get a head start now.
green/white 2 september 10, 11
Today is your in-class writing assignment. Please remember that this is due at the end of today’s class. You will submit to turnitin.com at the end of the period. I’ll move you out into an individual breakout room and come around to check on your progress.
HOMEWORK FOR OUR NEXT MEETING:
Next week begins our first unit of the year, short fiction. It’s one of my favorites, and I look forward to teaching you the basics of narrative. To that end, I’d like you to do the following before our next class:
(1) Flip to glossary in the back of Literature to Go. Define the following TERMS in your notes: in medias res, flashback, exposition, rising action, conflict, foreshadowing, protagonist/hero, heroine, antagonist, suspense, climax, resolution/denouement.
(2) Read Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes short story “The Adventure of the Speckled Band”. We’ll use this story to transition out of The Murder of Roger Ackroyd and to introduce our first element of fiction, PLOT.
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week 3
green/white 1 august 31, september 1
Green and White order classes will do things a little bit differently because of the missed day last week. Both classes will start with the vocabulary quiz before moving on to different things.
In my Green order classes, we’ll first 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. Then students will write their topic sentences in class.
In my White order classes, we’ll review the topic sentences you wrote for me over the weekend. Then we’ll jump into finding evidence in my body paragraph doc and look through: What is a body ¶? Don't worry. This is just a crash course. We'll have lots of time during the semester to go into greater detail about writing body ¶s.
HOMEWORK FOR OUR NEXT MEETING:
Return to the novel, now with your topic sentence in mind. Find and bring to our next class 4 quotations from the book that you think you could use in your body paragraph to support the idea in your topic sentence. Remember that your chosen quotation shouldn’t merely verify that something happens in the book but should have some striking quality in the language for your to analyze later. Look for language with
(1) a particularly striking figure of speech (a metaphor, a simile, personification, a symbol)
(2) a word with a strong connotation, positive or negative
(3) a passage with an immediately definable tone (sarcastic, calm, angry, modest, detached or sentimental, sincere, condescending, etc)
(4) an excessively violent or loving action
(5) a perfect detail describing the look of a room or a character.
green/white 2 september 2, 3
Notes from 9/1
Detective Fiction Project Selection
Today we’ll take your chosen quotations and practice embedding them into a sentence of your own. Then we’ll learn how to analyze the quotes, connecting them to the idea in the topic sentence.
What constitutes analysis? Let’s start with some images before we move to the written word.
HOMEWORK FOR OUR NEXT MEETING:
(1) 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. So, over the weekend, you’ll do some of the prep work on that paragraph. Work on blending your quotes, revise your topic sentence, etc. On Monday we’ll look at a few sample body paragraphs from former students.
(2) Begin work on your Detective Fiction Project. If you’re working in pairs or in a small group of three, get together virtually to make a plan of action. Please don’t forget to sign up on my spreadsheet.
what's due?
August 31 / September 1 - The Murder of Roger Ackroyd Vocabulary Quiz Manero’s QUIZLET
September 10 / 11 - The Murder of Roger Ackroyd Body Paragraph
September 28 - Detective Fiction Project
Detective Fiction Project Selection
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.”
