DAY 27: Poetry Out Loud & Review

We wrapped up our Poetry Out Loud recitations today, and spoke a bit about review. I am particularly concerned about mastery of the following skills:
- Sentence Diagramming
- Thesis Writing
- Quote Introductions
- Commentary Sentences
- MLA format

Here are the consistent problems I am seeing (i.e. between 10% and 20% of students are making mistakes of this nature):

• People don't understand helping verbs and are often putting verbs below the line in a sentence diagram.
• People don't quite understand what modal auxiliaries are.
• People are having difficulty remembering the difference between a predicate nominative and a direct object.
• People are writing thesis statements that are not arguable.
• People are writing thesis statements that do not explain how or why.
• People are improperly introducing quotations:
• Speakers are not named.
• Not all aspects of the quote are explained in the introduction.
• Quotes are being plopped in without any introductory material.
• People are summarizing what their evidence says rather than explaining what it proves (i.e. its relationship to the thesis).

IF YOU ARE HAVING PROBLEMS WITH ANY OF THESE AND REQUIRE ADDITIONAL ONE-ON-ONE INSTRUCTION, IT IS IMPORTANT FOR YOU TO MAKE AN APPOINTMENT WITH ME TO GET HELP.

In the interest of helping you determine whether or not you need additional help, you should expect a PRACTICE sentence diagramming quiz on Monday. The score for this will NOT count toward any grade.

I will poll each class to see if there is sufficient interest in after school review sessions, which I am happy to hold. As we head into our next unit, it will be important to have these skills absolutely mastered. This material will not get any easier before the exam, and getting a jump on it now will bring you much closer to success throughout the second quarter and in December.

Our next book is Watership Down, by Richard Adams. We'll begin it in class on Monday. Over the weekend, I asked you to rank the three most important traits of a team and the three most important traits of a leader from lists of about ten for each. For your rankings, I asked you to write a two paragraph journal (each paragraph must be a minimum of 6 sentences in length), one paragraph explaining/defending your rankings about the most important team qualities, and one paragraph explaining/defending your rankings about the most important qualities of a leader. This will be due on Monday, and you should bring your book to class with you.