english 1 - sophocles
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monday, march 18 (4)
Today we’ll go through my grading notes from the in-class essays to prepare you for the revision process. And there’s much revision needed from all of you. I’ll put a sampling of your work up on the smart board for us to critique together.
tuesday, march 19 (5)
Today we’ll continue reviewing basic essay skills like connecting body paragraphs, using evidence more effectively, and writing introductions & conclusions.
thursday, march 21 (7)
I will reserve today’s class to meet with many of you individually to work on your A Doll’s House essays. Remember the revision is due on Wednesday, March 27.
monday, march 25 (Green)
Defining poetry / What might we take away from these few weeks reading and thinking about poems?
We'll begin today by looking at a few of history's greatest definitions of poetry before trying to come up with one of our own.
Poems: Billy Collins, "Introduction to Poetry" and Eve Merriam, "How to Eat a Poem"
MAIN TOPICS TODAY: DEFINING POETRY / DIFFERENCES BETWEEN POETRY AND PROSE
HOMEWORK: By our next class, read pages 323-336 in Literature to Go. Please read all all background information, poems, and essays found on these pages. Be prepared for a quiz during our next class.
wednesday, march 27 (1)
Today we’ll continue defining poetry. I’ll then give a little advice for reading poetry, beginning with what we mean by a paraphrase, the first step in thinking about a new poem.
We’ll then work through Robert Hayden’s “Those Winter Sundays,”.
MAIN TOPICS TODAY: APPROACHING A NEW POEM / PARAPHRASING
HOMEWORK: By our next class, write a five-line poem about your life.
thursday, march 28 (2)
One way poems are different from prose is that they have a unit of measurement prose does not: the LINE. Both prose and poetry have the WORD, the SENTENCE, and the STANZA/PARAGRAPH. But poetry also has the LINE, which is not always used to convey meaning but to call attention to something else, quite often RHYTHM, which can also convey emotion. Today we’ll look at Theodore Roethke’s “My Papa’s Waltz” in conjunction with Hayden’s “Those Winter Sundays” to compare the subject of FATHERS AND SONS and to think about rhythm and the unit of the line.
MAIN TOPICS FOR TODAY: RHYTHM / UNITS OF MEANING
HOMEWORK: Finish your ¶ comparing “My Papa’s Waltz” and “Those Winter Sundays”.
monday, april 1 (4)
Today we’ll continue to work on your ¶ comparing “My Papa’s Waltz” and “Those Winter Sundays.” We’ll also look at another pair of poems that are thematically linked, “A Barred Owl” and “The History Teacher”.
tuesday, april 2 (5)
Sound conveys meaning. That may seem obvious, but don’t mistake what I mean—It’s not the words that sounds form I refer to, it’s the sounds themselves. Poets play with sound to heighten or emphasize the ideas the poems convey. We’ll talk today about rhyme and other sound devices poets use to convey meaning. We’ll use the following poems to illustrate:
John Keats, “When I have Fears That I May Cease to Be”
Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, “Mezzo Cammin”
MAIN TOPIC TODAY: SOUND
thursday, april 4 (7)
Today we’ll look at some common figures of speech and then turn to your text book to think about why poets use figures at all. Remember that figures of speech are meant to make poems more concrete not abstract as most students seem to think.
MAIN TOPIC TODAY: FIGURES OF SPEECH
monday, APRIL 8 (1)
Today we’ll look at a few poems in your anthology in order to understand the difference between subject and theme. Then we’ll work to revise your comparison ¶.
MAIN TOPICS TODAY: SUBJECT / THEME and FIGURATIVE LANGUAGE
tuesday, april 9 (2)
Sentence imitation (Blending Quotations)
thursday, april 11 (4)
Poetry Test
friday, april 12 (5)
Vocabulary Quiz, Units 15-16; Tennyson’s “Ulysses”
what's due?
Monday, March 25 - A Doll’s House Creative Assignment (EXTRA CREDIT)
Wednesday, March 27 - A Doll’s House In-class Essay REVISION
Please prepare a revision of your thesis and two body paragraphs, finishing the essay with a possible third body paragraph, an introduction, and a conclusion. The essay should by 1000 words (10% rule applies). Have your paper printed with proper MLA formatting, submitting by 3:30 PM on the due date. Do not forget to submit to turnitin.com. This revision will be worth another 100 points.
Thursday, April 11 - Poetry Test
Friday, April 12 - Vocabulary Quiz, Units 15-16
current text to bring daily
text to buy now
STUDYING POETRY
Essays on poetic theory (Make Aristotle, Horace, Sidney, Keats, and Shelley a priority)
ENJOYING POETRY
Compilation by Maria Popova at BP
Brian Cranston reads Shelley's "Ozymandias"
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.”
