Winter Break and Beyond

Students,

Here's a breakdown of what you need to finish (for now) for the semester:

1. finish reading Macbeth

2. read Susan Snyder's essay "Macbeth a Modern Perspective" found at the end of your paperback copy of the play.

3. finish the study guide with your Penguin Partner, but DO NOT share it -- I will give you time in class on 1/9/2012

4. read the [.pdf attached to today's email] -- the lecture by notable English poet W.H. Auden re: Macbeth

Before Saturday morning, I will send you an assignment for the attached.  Again, if you do this BEFORE you return, I will give you some extra credit for it ...

Enjoy the much needed Break!
Doc Jones

 

Great Writing Advice

Students,

As I am digging deeper into your first, typed "prompt" I'm finding some writing issues.

In order to learn some basics, I want you to commit the "seven sins" to memory.

(Thanks to Ms. Abraham for pointing out this great resource from Hamilton College!)

http://www.hamilton.edu/writing/seven-sins-of-writing

Dr. Jones

word master's year-long vocab. list

Students,

The list you worked on this past week with "Penguin Partners" has an associated quiz. I will award some extra credit for completing the quiz before noon on Sat., Oct. 8. You are on your honor to answer the questions without looking up the definitions!

Access the quiz at - http://is.gd/zzXFm1

Dr. Jones

Meet the Teacher Night 2011

Students,

Not all of your parents, who attended tonight, received a copy of our syllabus.

Please, share this email/blog post with them, and ask them to download a copy of our syllabus at:

http://goo.gl/pZAGI

Dr. Jones

Crime and Punishment - the Rest of the Study Guide

Students,

Here's a link to the remainder of the C & P study guide ...

Go ahead and resume reading the book.  Pick-up the Study Guide where you left off.

At this point, please save the Study Guide to Word, type in the file, save, and upload to your Google Docs space.

Dr. Jones

some helpful help pages for getting the most out of our CR-48s

Take a look at these two pages from Google:

1. using the task manager on a CR-48/Chromebook and

2. managing/navigating tabs and windows ...

generally, I feel these helpful hints may speed things up in the classroom ...

Dr. Jones

homework for 9/1 and classwork for 9/2

Students!

 

Just to reiterate, the poem you need to analyze tonight is the one in the first few pages of Poetry Supplement #1, written by Linda Pastan.  You should take a look at the Linda Pastan page at The Poetry Foundation.  (At some point I will tell you a story about Ruth Lilly and The Poetry Foundation.)

 

First, review the Vendler handout then run her "system" on the Pastan poem.  (If you were not in class - aka. U of I presentation - then run the Vendler system on this Pastan poem.)

 

Oh, I should point out that the "Vendler system" was invented by Harvard professor Helen Vendler, and -- check it out math studs -- she was a chem. major in college AND earned a Fullbright to study math! The system that we are using in class comes from her landmark text Poems, Poets, and Poetry.

---

 

For 9/2 in class, you will work in groups of five or four.  Two - three of you will use TP-CASST and the others of you will use Vendler to analyze the same poems together.  The large group will also be performing (yeah!) a choral reading next week.  More details on Tuesday ...

Dr. Jones

your first group email

Hello to Everyone!

All 51 of you have made it to our Google Group in record time -- two years ago this took three days NOT two.  Kudos!

For homework tonight remember to complete a TP-CASST on the 2nd R. Bly poem.  And, just to make this note worthwhile, please download and "Make a Copy" in your Google Docs of this second template ...

our media obsessions

Over the past week we discussed in class how and why (at least for a few minutes on Friday) American media and American media-consumers seem obsessed with "immortals" -- vampires, werewolves, and zombies.  Students had some good theories -- these "characters" are stand-ins for us in our current despair over the economy and rancorous politics and people are natural thrill-seekers and the ultimate thrill is cheating death, as these "immortals" do.

There are some books coming out in the next several months that carry forward the "immortals" media trope.

1. The final installment, The Night Eternal, in The Strain trilogy, the futuristic vampire thriller from director Guillermo del Toro and writing buddy Chuck Hogan shows up in stores and online on Oct. 25, 2011.

2. In early 2012, English professor Justin Cronin's The Twelve will publish.  The Twelve is a sequel to The Passage, the tremendously well-received "literary" vampire-novel, published in summer 2011.  As of this writing, The Passage  is available in paperback and, of course, as an e-book.

3. Finally, while it's characters are not "immortal" in the supernatural sense, Lev Grossman's The Magician King came out in mid-August.  The Magician King is the second installment in, Time fiction critic, Mr. Grossman's Magician Series.

first post of the new school year!

Welcome back, students (and welcome all readers) ...

I'm as excited as ever for a new school year, and I trust you are as well ...

This first week in AP Eng. Lit. (my new "prep" for 2011-12), we got to know one another a bit and practiced the multiple choice portion of the exam by finishing a 55-question practice test (from The Princeton Review).

On Friday (8/26/11) we enjoyed two short films, as it was, after all, first-Friday-youtube-day ... follow my links if you are interested in a re-viewing.  Make note of the techniques employed to tell two stories in such a small amount of time.  Note, too, that both of these stories are - at their core - stories about boy-girl relations.

begin Friday Night Lights

Today in class (4th period - 3rd period was at Operation Prom), we started reading Friday Night Lights.  I read aloud most of the first chapter, and I asked you to finish that chapter and read the 2nd chapter.  As you read, think about how the narrative - particularly with all of its focus on the miserable history of Odessa - begins to make a case for the importance of football to the citizens of the town.

Also, you have three film reviews to read regarding There Will Be Blood:
from The New York Times

by Roger Ebert (of The Chicago Sun-Times)

and  by blogger Jeffery Overstreet

By Monday, please have all of this material read!  (There will be an extra credit opportunity for Friday Night Lights and a quiz on the film reviews!)

this movie is gettin' good!

Notice how the film is so artfully made - the image and music and story and dialog all contribute.  Why do you think the director decided to shoot from an extreme long shot (with the camera far away) when Daniel and HW are reunited?  What's up with all of the slapping?  Is rancher Bandy really a "man of God" or is he in cahoots with Eli to embarrass Daniel?  What do you make of the scene in the saloon, just as Daniel and HW are settling in for two big steaks?  There is a great deal to consider!  A great deal indeed ...

We finish There Will Be Blood tomorrow, and then we will jump back to a focus on Gatsby for a class period and 1/2 ... then we will jump into Friday Night Lights.

Next week we will craft our Gatsby character web pages, begin our compare and contrast essays, and read some of Friday Night Lights.

day one of our traditional post-novel-film-tie-in

Today in class we began screening Paul Thomas Anderson's There Will Be Blood, the 2007 Academy Award winner for cinematography and acting (male lead, Daniel Day Lewis).

I believe you will see clear connections between the oilman Daniel Plainfield and the "entrepreneur" Gatsby, as both men relentlessly pursue their version of the proverbial "American Dream."  Note how Plainfield uses his "adopted son" HW as a shield to his ruthlessness similarly to Gatsby's staged parties, put-on for the purposes of snaring Daisy.

Also, there's a wonderfully grimy feel to, especially, the opening of There Will Be that proves making "dat money" is a dirty "bidness."  Plainfield and Gatsby will stop at nothing to achieve.

Symbol alert: from today (1) notice Plainfield emerging from the deep, dark hole in the earth just before the dynamite goes off and (2) make note of the literal meaning of his name -- Plainfield.

preliminary steps to our next assignment

Ok, by the end of class today (4/3/11) students should have

1. established an EverNote account
2. used the EverNote webclipping feature to add content to a notebook (either by right-clicking or by using the handy "elephant icon" in the extensions list or simply by cutting-n-pasting)
3. added a second article for a total of two
4. added a personal note to accompany one of the clipped articles
5. accessed two Google Docs (a. .pdf copy of ACT prep. materials - practice from last week - and b. your Catcher journal)
6. used Google Docs to type a short description of their favorite character in The Great Gatsby
7. opened Google Docs and added two - three hyper-links to web content related to their description (some hints - dictionary.com, the Fitzgerald Centennial Page @ Univer. of South Carolina, pictures from Google Images or, better yet, the Creative Commons search engine)

getting started with our CR-48s

So far you have been getting used to the Google Chrome CR-48, and you should know how to use the keyboard, touch pad, and the tabs feature of Chrome.  Also, you should be becoming more and more familiar with English 3 "living on the internet."

During the week of 5/2/11, we will review the CR-48 keyboard short cuts and begin to build our EverNote notebooks for the upcoming research unit.  (Hey, by the way, try this ... ctrl + alt + / ... notice that you get a cool animated .gif that shows all keyboard shortcuts!)

Stay tuned!