Monday, 3/2/15: Project Days

* Open

* Senior Project:  Please employ the time wisely, friends.

HW: Project

Block: M. C. Austen and Project

* Open

• Grammar Reminders: Apostrophe
• Please do Exercise 1

* Austen M. C. Test

* Work on Your Project and/or Chaucer

* Due Next Block Day for the Quiz
List 8: Compose sentences featuring consonance.

   acquiesce 

   amity 

   arduous 

   gestalt 

   inundate 

   perjury

   perspicuity 

   preposterous 

   trepidation 

   voluble 

HW: Vocabulary

Wednesday, 2/25/15: Villanelle; Austen

* Open

• Continue your Journal: Villanelle below

Villanelle

   Theodore Roethke (1908–1963)

• The Waking

• In one good sentence, describe the effect of the refraining lines.
• "Great Nature has another thing to do/  To you and me" (13-14).  What is that "thing"?  How do you know?  
• One sentence for both parts: If you were to locate a volta, where would it be?  Why did you choose that line? 
• Compose a theme for this poem in one sentence.  

* Read

HW: Turn in Your Form; Read

The Worse Poem Ever Written in English

Mr. Schwager has a book titled Very Bad Poetry.  In it we find some of the worst English poems ever written by published poets.  The poem considered the absolute worst of all time is from the late 1800s by Theophile Marzials.  A barge had overturned (perhaps on the Thames?), killing some or all aboard, and the poet wrote this response:

 

"A Tragedy" (Indeed, It Is; Published 1874)





To be a little more fair to him, he did edit (pick out poems for) a beautiful edition of poetry for children with illustrations by Walter Crane. 
 

Note To Awesome AP Students

I sometimes forget that some of you have Thursday night to read/study and some of you do not.  I apologize.  If you do not finish reading the novel by your block day, you will be ok.  You may finish reading it over the weekend.  The test this week is passage based, so you really could have taken it with no prior reading. 

All the best,

Mr. S

Tuesday, 2/24/15: Read Austen

* Open

• Turn in any AG Poems

Please Send in Your AP Test Form Today or Tomorrow.  It's time:

• Form
• Green is Good; Red is Good; White is Bad 

* Read Austen

HW: Read Austen

Monday, 2/23/15: Villanelles and Austen

* Open

• In your terms or notes, please copy down the definition of a villanelle. 

* Begin Journal: Villanelle together.

• Answer questions for poem(s) covered in class.  Continue tomorrow. 

* Pride and Prejudice Discussion

• Marriage examples in the novel.

* Read Pride and Prejudice

HW: Read Pride and Prejudice (test on the whole novel on block day)

Block Day: More Sonnets and Such

* Open

• AG Poem Peer Edit

• Grammar: Circle errors
• Imagery: Put a box around the best images in the poem

• You may choose to sent this in or wait to send in your Poetry Santa Cruz submission. 

* Journal: Sonnet Volta (or Turn) Study.  You may work in pairs.

• William Wordsworth
• "The World Is Too Much With Us"  
• 1. Is this following an Italian or an English style?  
• 2. Where is the volta?  In one or two sentences, explain what happens in the volta. 

• Reconsidering the past
• John Milton: "When I consider how my light is spent" 
  
• 3. Where is the volta?  In one or two sentences, explain what happens in the volta. 

• Do you remember your memorization from sophomore year?
• 4. Where is the volta?  In one or two sentences, explain what happens in the volta. 

• Last poem: Gerard Manley Hopkins: "The Windhover"

• 5. My professor at San Jose State believed this to be the most beautiful sonnet in the the English language.  The volta supports but does not create the beauty.  What creates the beauty of the poem?
• 6. Where is the volta?  In one or two sentences, explain what happens in the volta.

•  If you finish early, read a couple more from William Wordsworth:

•  "Nuns Fret Not at Their Convent’s Narrow Room"
• "Scorn not the Sonnet"

* Vocabulary List 7: Compose sentences with assonance. Quiz next week on block day.

allay 
  capacious
  diurnal 
  extricate
  ignominious 
  mitigate 
  palpitate 
  phlegmatic 
  propitious 
  prostrate 

* Project Work

HW:  Austen-- ch. 45 (tested on entire novel on block day next week)

Send in Your Poem if You Wish (and take a picture of your envelope before you send it).

• The overall winner will receive a $200 award and will be a guest at the National Agriculture Day Spring Luncheon.
  The winning entry published on 15,000 placemats and distributed to restaurants countywide next year!
  Entries must be postmarked or delivered to Santa Cruz County Farm Bureau 
•   141 Monte Vista Ave.  
• Watsonville, Ca 95076
• 
   By Wednesday, February 26, 2014.

Ash Wednesday, 2/18/15: Sonnets and Such

 Open

• Grammar: Punctuate:
  • Yet even now declares the Lord
    return to me with all your heart
    with fasting with weeping and with mourning and rend your hearts and not your garments (ESV Joel 2.12)

* Exercise: Read this poem and locate the volta or shift or turning point.  Most sonnets have a volta.  You'll learn to find them; it will assist your interpretive skills.

• Petrarch  

• Let's try the same thing again:
• Sonnet CXXX by William Shakespeare

• Notice any difference in the volta placement? 

* Add to Terms: The Sonnet Definition

* Begin an AG Poem in Your Composition Book

• Thirty years ago, Arturo Flores started the men's soccer team I've played on in Watsonville: Real Cueramaro. 

• Chaucer Editors: Please write the names on the board of any student who needs to send you a piece of the project.  Please strike the name out when you receive what you need.  Thank you. 

HW: RD of AG Poem in Your Composition Book; First Evidence of Senior Project Work 

Extended Chapel Today

Faithfully Fight Fifty Shades of Folly Forearmed

• With Salvo: "Desperately Disconnected"

• With Chesterton

     "One of the wise and awful truths which this brown-paper art reveals, is this, that white is a colour. It is not a mere absence of colour; it is a shining and affirmative thing, as fierce as red, as definite as black. When, so to speak, your pencil grows red-hot, it draws roses; when it grows white-hot, it draws stars. And one of the two or three defiant verities of the best religious morality, of real Christianity, for example, is exactly this same thing; the chief assertion of religious morality is that white is a colour. Virtue is not the absence of vices or the avoidance of moral dangers; virtue is a vivid and separate thing, like pain or a particular smell. Mercy does not mean not being cruel or sparing people revenge or punishment; it means a plain and positive thing like the sun, which one has either seen or not seen.

      Chastity does not mean abstention from sexual wrong; it means something flaming, like Joan of Arc. In a word, God paints in many colours; but He never paints so gorgeously, I had almost said so gaudily, as when He paints in white."

• With Valentine

Feastday: February 14
Patron of Love, Young People, Happy Marriages
Died: 269
"Valentinus was a Roman priest martyred during the reign of Claudius the Goth [Claudius II]. Since he was caught marrying Christian couples and aiding any Christians who were being persecuted under Emperor Claudius in Rome [when helping them was considered a crime], Valentinus was arrested and imprisoned. Claudius took a liking to this prisoner -- until Valentinus made a strategic error: he tried to convert the Emperor -- whereupon this priest was condemned to death. He was beaten with clubs and stoned; when that didn't do it, he was beheaded outside the Flaminian Gate [circa 269]" (Catholic.org/saints).
 

• With Paul 

2 Timothy 3:

But know this, that in the last days perilous times will come: For men will be lovers of themselves, lovers of money, boasters, proud, blasphemers, disobedient to parents, unthankful, unholy, unloving, unforgiving, slanderers, without self-control, brutal, despisers of good, traitors, headstrong, haughty, lovers of pleasure rather than lovers of God, having a form of godliness but denying its power. And from such people turn away!  For such men are those who creep into households and make captives of gullible women loaded down with sins, led away by various lusts, always learning and never able to come to the knowledge of the truth. Now as Jannes and Jambres resisted Moses, so do these also resist the truth: men of corrupt minds, disapproved concerning the faith; but they will progress no further, for their folly will be manifest to all, as theirs also was.

But you have carefully followed my doctrine, manner of life, purpose, faith, longsuffering, love, perseverance, persecutions, afflictions, which happened to me at Antioch, at Iconium, at Lystra—what persecutions I endured. And out of them all the Lord delivered me. Yes, and all who desire to live godly in Christ Jesus will suffer persecution. But evil men and impostors will grow worse and worse, deceiving and being deceived. But you must continue in the things which you have learned and been assured of, knowing from whom you have learned them, ¹⁵ and that from childhood you have known the Holy Scriptures, which are able to make you wise for salvation through faith which is in Christ Jesus.

All Scripture is given by inspiration of God, and is profitable for doctrine, for reproof, for correction, for instruction in righteousness, that the man of God may be complete, thoroughly equipped for every good work.


I Thessalonians 4

 For this is the will of God, your sanctification: that you should abstain from sexual immorality; that each of you should know how to possess his own vessel in sanctification and honor, not in passion of lust, like the Gentiles who do not know God; that no one should take advantage of and defraud his brother in this matter, because the Lord is the avenger of all such, as we also forewarned you and testified. For God did not call us to uncleanness, but in holiness. Therefore he who rejects this does not reject man, but God, who has also given us His Holy Spirit.

• Really, with Christ, of course. 

Tuesday, 2/17/15: First Evidence Work

* Open

• Calendar

* Research for First Evidence

HW: Research; work on an AG Poem (RD in Composition due Block Day)