DAY 1 - CYCLE 10 - SEMESTER 2

Today, you turned in your Say Show Mean papers. (Those who used your "Get Out of Jail Free" cards, I will NOT seek you out with a reminder to meet the terms of the agreement that card establishes.) Afterwards, we covered Lesson 20 in the Sentence Diagramming Workbook, "Indirect Objects." Remember that with an indirect object, the "to" is implied, as suggested by the blank line in the diagram itself. You can always insert a "to" after the verb in a sentence using an indirect object, which should help you understand. Then, we covered the last five words of Unit 7 in the vocabulary book. Groups 4 and 6, you will have a brief, 10-question objective quiz on Thursday covering ONLY Unit 7. Group 2, yours will be on Friday. Continue to bring your book to class as we will be doing the exercises in the book.

Then we began 1984. We started with an anticipation guide in which I asked you to respond to several ethical/political statements. One of these statements will form the basis of your 12-sentence paragraph due a week from Thursday. We loosely talked about several of the statements, but you'll need to follow up on your own to cultivate a more dimensional view of your own values. I also distributed a Study Guide, which I will not check. This is for you to make sure you are understanding the details of the reading. If you tend to get a B or below on your reading quizzes, then you should use the study guide to make sure you are getting the larger ideas.

Ultimately, Orwell asks us to take a long, hard look at some of our most unquestioned convictions. Why does any government have a right to exist? For what purpose? What traits and motives make any government legitimate? And once in power, to what extent is it right for that government to want to keep that power? What means are permissable? You will be exploring the very same questions in Western Civilizations in your study of Totalitarianisn, and they are questions you have already loosely entertained in your reading of Lord of the Flies, Macbeth, Watership Down, and Farenheit 451. We will apply your burgeoning understanding to discussions which connect the novel to articles and videos about North Korea, Burma (Myanmar), the Taliban and others. This book is not an articfact: it is a vibrant document that addresses some of the most pressing questions of the age. How do we construct stable societies without restricting humanity? Under what circumstances may any power be trusted? These questions shape our own world today, just as they do for our protagonist of this 1949 classic, Winston Smith.

Tomorrow, we will begin class with the question, Why can't Winston remember his childhood? There will be additional questions, but read through page 25 and be prepared to start with this one and to offer several of your own. You'll be driving discussion collectively, and you'll be keeping notes as you go.

Tangentially, we got to some questions about new demands on our government in the wake of 9/11. We looked at some headline grabbers of the past few years that both sides have sought to spin for political gain. Here are links to follow up stories that represent a variety of versions, and homefully, explain the situations better:

Valerie Plame

• Outed agent Valerie Plame's interview with 60 Minutes host, Katie Couric
• The story as the conservative "National Review" sees it
• The story as David Corn of the liberal "The Nation" sees it
• A source verified timeline of events that seeks to avoid bias

US Government wiretapping of US citizens

• An overview of warrantless wiretapping (Washington Post)
• The legal debate over wiretapping (NPR)
• One of the stories that broke the warrantless wiretapping story (NY Times)
• OK, not so much about wiretapping, but an interesting article about how technology is forcing private freedoms/public security conflicts to the forefront (NY Times)

You can find TONS more, both conservative and liberal, on these stories.

HOMEWORK

1. Start thinking about that 12-sentence paragraph. Read a paper tonight. Talk about these statements over the dinner table. Read an op-ed page from any paper.

2. Read 1-25 of 1984. Come ready to discuss. Write down your questions.

3. Study for Thursday's (4&6)/Friday's (2) vocabulary quiz.

DAY 5 - CYCLE 9 - SEMESETER 2

Today was a work day so you could make progress on your Say Show Mean.

YOUR SAY SHOW MEAN IS DUE ON MONDAY. IT SHOULD BE TYPED AND DOUBLE SPACED.

PLEASE FOLLOW CONVENTIONS:

• Poem titles appear in quotation marks.
• Refer to the narrator of the poem as the speaker, not the poet.
• Use line numbers to indicate where a quote is located within the poem: The soldiers often “think of firelit homes, clean beds, and wives” (8) when at the front.
• Use a slash to indicate the start of a new line in the poem segment you are quoting: The speaker conveys that the soldier suffered greatly in the trenches: “I see them in the foul dug-outs, gnawed by rats,/And in the ruined trenches, lashed with rain” (9-10).
• Quote only a few words, not an entire stanza.
• Avoid cliches. Don't offer meaningless drivel like, "The poet shows it is important to enjoy the little things in life."
• ABSOLUTELY NO INSTANCES OF "This shows that" (or anything of similar ilk) SHOULD APPEAR IN YOUR ESSAY!

Again, here is a significant recommendation: CIRCLE THE NOUNS IN YOUR CHOSEN POEM. Start looking for patterns in them. Are they references to weaponry? Nature? Duties? Leisure? You can do the same with verbs. If there are symbolic pieces (poppies, torch, etc.), think about the attributes of those items and look up information about them

You should have one coherent paragraph for the Say section, one for the Show section and one for the Mean section.

PLEASE BRING 1984 TO CLASS WITH YOU ON MONDAY!

DAY 4 - CYCLE 9- SEMSETER 2

Today, we discussed a poem of your choice and talked through the Say Show Mean exercise. "Dreamers," "Dulce et Decorum Est," and "In Flanders Fields" were all the subjects of dicussion.

Here is a significant recommendation: CIRCLE THE NOUNS IN YOUR CHOSEN POEM. Start looking for patterns in them. Are they references to weaponry? Nature? Duties? Leisure? You can do the same with verbs. If there are symbolic pieces (poppies, torch, etc.), think about the attributes of those items and look up information about them).

Tomorrow is a workday. Tonight, just keep working on your Say Show Mean. Group 2, your notes are here.

DAY 3 - CYCLE 9 - SEMESTER 2

Well, today was a bit of hitting the reset button. After discussing the Macbeth tests, we went over Say-Show-Mean in class to catch you up from last Friday. I had you turn in whatever you wrote over the weekend. You'll be completing a fully written Say-Show-Mean this week, polishing it over the weekend and turning it in on Monday.

For tonight, the homework is light (hope you went to An Evening with the Experts at school tonight!): read all of the poems in the packet and pick the one that you want to talk about. Be ready to give the poet and title immediately when you get to class. We'll discuss what we can in class, and then you'll have a work day to start your writing. We'll go through the same process as today, asking the central questions for each portion:

SAY: Who is the speaker? Where is he/she speaking? To whom? About what? With what overall attitude?

SHOW: How is the poet trying to get the reader to think/feel particular things? (Remember, the same skills you use to parse out the hidden meanings in the words uttered to you by your secret crush are pretty much the same kind of skills you bring to bear on the study of literature, once again proving that much of life can be expressed by means of analogy to eighth grade social dramas.)

MEAN: So what? Why does the poet want us to feel this way? How does that help us better understand history, ourselves, or the reason we're on the planet?

DAY 2 - CYCLE 9 - SEMESTER 2

I was out today (Friday, April 3rd), so Mrs. Basson subbed for me. According to her:

1. You diagrammed odd # sentences from Lesson 19 in the sentence diagramming workbook.
2. You did a long and deep analysis of "Anthem for Doomed Youth" by Wilfred Owen, focusing on the images raised in the poem. Remember that an "image" in poetry is something that appeals to any of the five senses, not just the visual sense.
3. You discussed what it means to "parse" something.
4. You covered the vocabulary terms in the poem: anthem, pall, orisons, pallor, shires.
5. You did NOT review the Say-Show-Mean exercise, which was supposed to be the focus of the day, so we'll work on that on Monday.
6. Group 2 read aloud "Dulce et Decorum Est" and "The Parable of the Old Man and the Young," but Groups 4 and 6 did not.
7. FOR HOMEWORK, you were asked to write one paragraph for EACH stanza of the poem, answering the question, "What does the stanza SHOW?" You were to use three quotes per paragraph.

DAY 1 - CYCLE 9 - SEMSESTER 2

Today, we covered the next five words of Unit 7 and finished the sentence diagramming review on page 60. Then, you took out your homework and we discussed Rupert Brooke's "The Dead" and "The Soldier."

Specific questions about the poems included:
"The Dead"

1. In line 9, who is "our"?
2. What is personified in line 11? How?
3. What is personified in line 13? How?
4. What effect does this personification have? What does it tell us about the speaker's values & beliefs?
5. What exactly have the Dead brought? How has it changed the recipients?
6. Consider this as an Italian sonnet: what exactly is "posed" by the octave? What exactly is "resolved" by the sestet?

"The Soldier"

1. To whom is the speaker of this poem addressing his words?
2. What exactly makes the "richer dust" referenced in line 4 actually "richer"?
3. According to what is suggested in the octave, what makes England special? What makes the speaker special?
4. There is a transition between the octance and sestet. What exactly is the nature of that transition?
5. Where is the speaker in the sestet?
6. About whom is the speaker speaking in the last line? Why are they at peace?

Then we moved on to discuss Mary Herschel-Clarke's "The Mother," which was written in response to Rupert Brooke's "The Soldier." We read it aloud together, and addressed the following questions:

1. To whom is the speaker of this poem addressing her comments?
2. Where does she assume her audience is?
3. How is the speaker handling things?
4. Why are the last two lines in parentheses?
5. What is the attitude of this speaker?
6. Does this poet like/admire Brooke's perspective?

After we concluded our discussion, I distributed a handout on Say Show Mean exercises. You will do a group Say-Show-Mean activity in class tomorrow on Wilfred Owen's "Anthem for Doomed Youth" (page 8 of the packet).

HOMEWORK

Read over both the poem and the worksheet distributed in class (both handouts are linked to on this blog and you can find them on the wikispace) in preparation for tomorrow. You will want to refamiliarize yourself with literary terms.

Add 15 adjectives about WWI to the wikispace page (it will be up by 4pm).

DAY 5 - CYCLE 8 - SEMESTER 2

Today, we went through the first five words of Unit 7 in the vocabulary book. Then, we did four sentence diagrams on page 59 of the sentence diagramming workbook. Afterwards, I distributed the WWI poetry packet and cruelly told you that you needed to memorize ten poems by Monday. Hooray for April Fool's Day! You don't need to memorize anything. Thanks for letting me have fun at your expense, though!

Together, we read through the introductory essay. Test your remembrance of that essay by asking yourself:

1. What is a "poetic moment"?
2. How is form important to poetry?
3. How should you approach the reading of poetry to get anything out of it?

We then read over some instructions about how to read poems. Remember that simply to go through them once to get the gist of them is like walking by a stadium to get an understanding of a particular game of football. Doing so in either case won't lead you to a rewarding understanding and you certainly won't have any fun. So, take the trouble to get inside where what you see might excite, startle, and amuse you.

We'll be getting more into form in the following days, but for today we looked at sonnet forms: the Italian, English and Spenserian. Check your memory:

1. What are the stanza formations in each?
2. What is the rhyme scheme in each?
3. How do the stanzas relate to one another?
4. What's an octave, sestet, rhyming couplet, and quatrain?
5. What meter are sonnets written in? How would the rhythm of one line of that meter sound?

When poets deviate from these standards, look for reasons why he/she might have done that. Often, there's a reason that gives a clue to the poem's meaning. In two of the classes, I had the chance to tell you about a segment of the late Randy Pausch's "The Last Lecture;" the segment of which I spoke is at 37:20 in the video. The reason the ending of that virtual world is hilarious is because its opening was pure precious treacle. The whole notion of contrast is vitally important to WWI poetry (and just about any human endeavor to teach or amuse, frankly), so keep an eye out for it.

We began to look at a poem together: Rupert Brooke's "The Dead." Brooke, as I mentioned, died on the way to Gallipoli, and while he died young, perhaps he was spared a worse fate by missing that particular military encounter.

We all got through the first octave and started to make some good sense of that. But there is still much to be gained, and that's where your homework starts. In groups 2 and 4, I had brains enough left to collect your homework assignment due today: the list of thirty words you associate with WWI (15 nouns, 15 verbs). Group 6, I still need most of yours. You'll be writing your own war sonnet over the course of this unit, just to get a feel for what things are like on the other side of the pen.

But for tonight, you just need to get comfortable with the process of reading a poem for meaning, so I gave you a paraphrasing assignment.

HOMEWORK
Using the model poem, paraphrase, and note/comment form I passed out in class, complete your own paraphrase of the last stanza of "The Dead" and do one for "The Soldier," the poem that appears immediately to the right of "The Dead." We will talk about them tomorrow, right after we do some vocabulary and sentence diagramming. Group 6, bring your word lists with you.