We had a productive class today. We covered a lot of material, and the students engaged well with our work.
I took our Quick Write prompts from a list of table topic prompts that Toastmasters uses. Our prompts: "What does your joy look like today?" and "When was the last time you tried something new?" We discussed what it might look like to stand up and talk off the cuff on one of these topics.
I chose our Words of the Day, selecting words that I thought students might encounter in their academic work:
nuance -- a subtle difference in or shade of meaning
oxyomoron -- an expression that expresses opposites; ex. a loving enemy, and open secret, a deafening silence
perestroika -- the restructuring of the political and economic systems in the USSR during the early 1980s
queue -- a British term that refers to forming a line of people waiting for a service or an item.
Our next activity was a Pop Quiz about the reading assignment for today. Last week when it was apparent that a number of the students had either not read the assigned stories or done the homework, I mentioned that a quiz might happen. In the past I've told the students that when they don't do homework, they are really only hurting themselves. This is not completely true. In classes where group discussions are important, coming unprepared to class affects everyone. Sitting back and letting those who have done the reading and finished the assignments be the ones responsible for making the discussions move forward is unfair and irresponsible. (There may be more quizzes in the future . . . just sayin'.)
With that said, the students did a great job with our discussions of our three short stories, "Dr. Heidegger's Experiment," "An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge." and "The Cask of Amontillado." We talked about the fountain of youth, intentionally ambiguous writing, teseracts and wrinkles in time, and revenge. Next week, we have more short stories by American authors.
The rough drafts and pre-writes of the Problem/Solution or Cause/Effect Essays were due today. For those students who planned on e-mailing them, please get them in over the weekend. A note about digital copies of papers -- please send them as Google Docs or Word documents. I don't have the patch on my computer for Apple Pages. If neither of these options is available to a student, the text of the paper can be copied and pasted into an e-mail.
We are continuing to work on sentence construction, and this week our focus was on compound sentences, coordinating conjunctions, and commas. Kayla led our work through one of the worksheets (and did a great job!) I plan to utilize students more to lead these discussions. Why should I have all the fun?
Assignments for Next Week
-- Read the stories by Harte (p. 64), Twain (p. 175), Jewett (p. 87) and Crane (p. 34)
-- Complete both sides of the two short story worksheets. One of the sides can be substituted with an artistic response (i.e. a drawing, poem, painting, etc.)
-- Finish Grammar Worksheets
-- Gather any missing homework.
Links for This Week
Class Notes
Have a great weekend. Spring is just around the corner, so enjoy your winter activities while you can!
Mrs. Prichard
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