Writing 2 Class Notes -- February 21

Greetings!

Thankfully, we all made it to class safely despite our biggest snow of the season.  With President's Day in mind, our Quick Write for today was "Write a promo for a new national holiday."  I was at first amazed at the fact that two students, one from Writing 1 and one from Writing 2, had almost identical Quick Writes.  That is until they admitted that they had texted one another about the topic. In the famous words of Sergeant Schulz from Hogan's Heroes:  "Jolly jokers!" We did a second quick write yesterday which included a quote about writing.  The students were to write what this quote meant and how they could apply it.  They decided it was too big a task to do alone and designated one student to write down their combined ideas.

I divided the class into small groups so that each group could discuss and then present one of the Short Stories to the class.  Like food and music preferences, people sometimes have opposite reactions to a piece of literature.  One of the short stories, "Nobody" by Charles Dickens, was thought by one student to be "genius" and by another to be "stupid."  It's as we discuss and unpack our individual perspectives that we better understand the writing.  In an indirect manner, thinking about someone else's writing makes us better writers.

I handed back the students' final copies of their Cause/Effect or Problem/Solution essays.  As always, I enjoy reading their papers.  I also learn a lot about various topics.  We took some time to review how to write numbers in essays.  Over the next 2 weeks (we don't have class next week) they are to be writing their Evaluation Essay rough draft.  We discussed this a bit, and I've written about it on the blog.  This paper is to be at least 3 pages long.  Not including name, date, title, etc,. this is approximately 1000 words.  Most of the previous papers have been about 2 pages long, so this may be more of a challenge.  It's a good thing that I know they are ready for it.

Assignments for Next Week:
-- Read "Dr. Heidigger's Experiment"  (Hawthorne, p. 73); "An Occurence at Owl Creek Bridge" (Bierce, p. 10); "The Cask of Amonillado" (Poe, p. 156)
-- Note:  No short stories worksheets this week
-- Write rough draft of Evaluation Essay

Have a great week!
Mrs. Prichard