Monday, Feb. 1: Talking Character

* Open

• Think and be ready to respond: Name a favorite character from thy years of reading and viewing?  What do you enjoy about this character?

 


* Character Fodder

• "The Fiery Wooing of Sir Mordred" link here
• Annotations
• Highlight and label five ways that Wodehouse develops character in this story.

HW:

• Finish the story and annotations if you did not in class
• Take Notes on All Bold Words for Story Ch. 3 (due block day)
• Finish Your One-Page Proposal This Week (or don't and get stuck with too much work next week)
• 10 Definition Due Block Day

Perrine's Hardback Book

Hi students,

If you would like to buy Perrine's literature, here are two ways:

• Used for as little as $10
• New edition ($200) or rent it as a hardback book for as little as $32. 

Either edition is fine:

Out of Class Experience (required for AP; extra credit for English 4)

Assignment Due Date: March 2

Upcoming Possibilities (I may not mention any again this quarter):

• Contests:
• Coastal Commission Poetry (Jan. 30): Theme: "California Coast"
• Farm Bureau Poetry (Feb. 24): Theme: "Grown in Santa Cruz and the Pajaro Valley"

• Gilroy Library

•  Saturday, February 13^th at 3pm Local Author Visit by Claudia Melendez Salinas: Learn about the inspiration behind her novel, A Fighting Chance about growing up Latino in a poor barrio.
  
  
  Saturday, February 13^th at 3:30pm Poetry Readings: Read or listen to original poems. 
  
  
  
   

Sample Student Essays for Refreshment

If you would like examples of what high to low scoring essays look like for a poetry prompt, you may study these.  The poem is older and more traditionally formed than the piece you will have, but it will help to review:

Free-Response Questions (just read the poem; it is a Renaissance sonnet)

Sample Essay Responses to the Poem

Enjoy,

Mr. S

Week 24: Block

Week 24: Wednesday, 1/27

* Open

• On paper, represent sickness of any type through imagery. 
• Project Update: I met with Mr. Mansfield today.  We have minor changes to make.  I will make the turn-in window one week longer.  I will announce modifications on block day.  Do not turn this in on block day this week.

* Ch. 4 "Imagery" Perrine's Poetry: pp.771 and following

Notes: 

Imagery: the representation through language of sense experience.

• sound (auditory)
• sight (visual)
• touch (tactile, kinesthetic/muscle, organic/internal)
• taste (gustatory)
• smell (olfactory)

What images does the author use? What does he/she focus on in a sensory way? How do the kinds of images the author puts in or leaves out reflect his/her style? Are they vibrant? Prominent? Plain? Images differ from detail in the degree to which they appeal to the senses. A farmer and a real estate developer would use different imagery to describe the same piece of land. Imagery would differ in a romantic vs. realistic description of the countryside.

* Poems

• "Spring": 774
• "The Forge": 777
• "The Convergence of the Twain": 778
• "Those Winter Sundays": 781 

HW:

• Study poems in this chapter, especially "The Forge" and "Spring," for a test tomorrow. 
• 10 Vocabulary Words Defined.  
• Did you read through at least chapter 15 in Pride and Prejudice?  If not, do so.

Week 24: Tuesday

Open

• Please review the link on the right about your senior project

Work on Your Senior Project Proposal

I Can Check Homework

Read Austen

HW:  Work on Your Proposal

Week 24: Monday's Board: Comment to This Post if You Want to Leave a Poem for Someone (No Haters = )

Monday, 1/25/16

 

Monday, January 25th - Winter Sports Rally (schedule below)

* Open

• Compose Four Lines Or More For Someone; Focus on Connotation
• Check these out:
• Coastal Commission Poetry (Jan. 30): Theme: "California Coast"
• Farm Bureau Poetry (Feb. 24): Theme: "Grown in Santa Cruz and the Pajaro Valley"

* Perrine's Poetry Ch. 3: Denotation and Connotation

• Example Poems
• "Naming of Parts" pg. 764
• "The World is Too Much With us" pg. 766

HW: Read the last three poems in the chapter.  Choose one to answer all the questions for.

• To get full credit
• Answer each question considerately in complete sentences.
• Answer on paper. 

* Per. 4 Only

• Suspense is often created through mystery or a dilemma. 

• Surprise ending: fair, or plot manipulation (deus ex machina)?
• closed vs. open/indeterminate ending
• artistic unity: all aspects (plot, description, word choice, setting, irony, action) of the story support the central purpose 
• chance = occurrence of an event with no apparent cause (killing albatross)
• coincidence = two events with a peculiar correspondence (both cars on same lonely road in "A Good Man is Hard to Find")
• Denotation and connotation

Pride and Prejudice

Please buy a paper or hardback (also paper) copy of Pride and Prejudice.

Until you do, you may read from these on your iPad:

• .pdf edition 

• epub, kindle, html, etc.  

• Audio: Librivox, version 3

 

1/21-22: Block

* Open

• Before the Bell: Review "A Good Man is Hard to Find" pg. 495 and following

* "A Good Man is Hard to Find"

• Discussion
• Describe the family. 
• Who is the protagonist?  How do you know?
• Who is the antagonist? 
• Did you find any racism in the story?  Explain. 
• Who appears to be the most sensitive, intelligent character in the story?
• Why does "The Misfit" call himself that? 
• How does the grandmother apply her religion?
• In paragraph 134, the Misfit say, "No pleasure but meanness."  What does he mean by this here?  His last words are, "It's no real pleasure in life."  Is this a contradiction of what came before or a restatement.  Explain your choice.

• Ch. 2 Notes Reviewed and applied to our story.

* Quiz

* Pride and Prejudice

• Introduction
• Your last female author died age 39, this author begins her career at age 36 (though Austen had been writing novels since her early 20's). 
• Reading 

 

HW: Weekend reading

• English 4: Chapters 1-10 (30 pages in a standard book)

• AP English: Chapters 1-15 (50 pages in a standard book)

Audio with chapter divisions on Spotify.

Wednesday, 1/20/16: A Good Story is Not Always Hard to Find

* Open

• Begin defining 10 words from your reading (use Rime...)
• Quiz on block day: 
• Poetry Ch.1-2 Notes
• Fiction Ch. 2 Notes
• "Rime" and "A Good Man is Hard to Find"

* Discuss Rime... and The Tempest 

* Begin our Study of Fiction

• Ch. 2 Fiction introduction  
• "A Good Man is Hard to Find"

HW:

• Read and take notes on the Ch. 2 Fiction introduction and read the story ("A Good Man is Hard to Find") 
• Review for the quiz.

 

Tuesday: 1/19/16

* Open

• Jan Term Survey
• Check out this MVCS Survival Guide 
• Here is what a proposal for such a project looks like. 

* Notes: Refreshment on the language of comparison:



"The ice was all around:
It cracked and growled, and roared and howled"

•  This is a metaphor.  The ice is given animalistic attributes.  This is not a simile because it equates directly (ice is beastly; a simile would say the ice was like a beast, growling, etc.).  It is not personification because the ice is not given human qualities (it has animal qualities).

 "Day after day, day after day,
We stuck, nor breath nor motion;
As idle as a painted ship upon a painted ocean."

• The ship is compared to a painting (not a person) but is not a painting.  "Like" or "as" is used to create subtle distance.  This is a simile. 

"The Sun came up upon the left,
Out of the sea came he!
And he shone bright, and on the right
Went down into the sea."

•  The sun is compared to a man but still functions as the sun itself.  It is not a man.  This is personification.

"Her lips were red, her looks were free,
Her locks were yellow as gold:
Her skin was white as leprosy,
The Nightmare Life-in-Death was she,
Who thicks man's blood with cold."

• The state of Life-in-Death or living dead actually shows up as a living person.  She and Death (her crew-member on the ghastly galleon) are examples of anthropomorphism.

* AP Only

• In "Mirror" (pg. 749) we see a complexity that will allow for anthropomorphism or personification.  Why?  Well, the speaker (mirror) begins with the "I" and acts in way one would expect from anthropomorphism; however, the second stanza breaks or morphs the idea into a new figure (a lake).  This subverts a stable identification of self-reflection with a specific person/character/thing (mirror or lake), considering possibilities in each, reminding the reader that there is no necessary person in the mirror (beside, ironically, the young lady) justifying personification or, if you would use your rhetoric from last year, prosopoeia.  In an AP environment, any of the three would be admissible.

* The Rime of the Ancient Mariner

• The Rime of the Ancient Mariner .pdf (or the book in class: Top 500 Poems pages 433 and following)
• Audio version of The Rime of the Ancient Mariner  

HW: Finish reading/listening to The Rime of the Ancient Mariner 

Rime of the Ancient Mariner Journal due Tomorrow:

1. Describe the speakers in the poem. 
2. What is the central purpose of this poem?
3. Explain five intellectually significant similarities between Rime of the Ancient Mariner and The Tempest. 

Block Day, Week 22

* Open

• Review notes

* Perrine's Poetry Ch. 1-2 Quiz

* When you finish, begin reading The Rime of the Ancient Mariner.

• If you are home: The Rime of the Ancient Mariner .pdf (or the book in class)
• Mark anything you find confusing.  I will answer any question in a while.

* I will check work while you read.

* Review the Senior Project some more. 

* Review Perrine's

* The Rime of the Ancient Mariner by Samuel Taylor Coleridge

• Background
• 18th Century in Brief
• Rational (further influence of Greek and Latin learning)
• Poets become more wits; perfectly clever, social, sophisticated
• The rise of journalism (and coffee shops): Samuel Johnson and the dictionary
• The novel "new"
• Some say Robinson Crusoe by Daniel Defoe (1719)
• Some say Tom Jones by Henry Fielding (1749)
• Whatever the case, we will see a growing emphasis on character development and the average person. 
  
• Romantic Era  (1800-1850)
• "During the spring of 1798, two young English poets, aged 27 and  25, sold some of their poems to raise money for a trip to Germany.  Each had published books of poetry, but a new joint work was to  be anonymous. As Samuel Taylor Coleridge, the younger of the  pair, told the printer: 'Wordsworth’s name is nothing . . . mine
  stinks.' "  So begins the printing of Lyrical Ballads (within which Rime of the Ancient Mariner is published).  
• Reaction again the mechanized, industrialized, socially cold and austere, spiritually dead urban world.
• Listen
• When finished: Let's begin questioning Rime with questions from Perrine.

HW: None (Winter Ball...but in the future, you will have outside reading on the weekend)



 

Wednesday, 1/13/16

* Open

• Work on Chapter 2

* Begin Research Project Introduction

* Work on Chapter 2

HW: "The Man He Killed", "A Study of Reading Habits", "Is my team plowing", "Break of Day", AP Adds: "Mirror"; 10 Words Defined


 

Tuesday 1/12/16: Perrine Poetry, Ch. 1-2

* Open

• Begin taking notes on the rest of the ch. 1 poetry intro. (pp. 723-725).  If you finish before your peers, see if you can handle one of the strangest poems in this chapter, "Terence, this is stupid stuff." 
• I will check ch. 1 while you work. 

* Review ch. 1

• Consider vocabulary 

* Work on ch. 2 on your own. For each chapter, you must:

• Read the entire introduction (usually 2-7 pages)
• Take notes on key ideas and elements covered
• Study example poems in the introduction
• Respond to the assigned poems for your homework journal assignments on paper
• Chapter 2 required poems (due block day on paper):
• "The Man He Killed", "A Study of Reading Habits", "Is my team plowing", "Break of Day", AP Adds: "Mirror"

HW: Work on Poems and Definitions

A.E. Housman has Poison Enough to Share

Monday, 1/11/16: Renewed Hopes

* Open

• Look over the following links
• Course Outline (see above; scroll down to quarter 3)
• Quarter Reading (see right under "Reading")
• Poetry and Story Studies (Link to These Units On the Right or above in the "Google Drive")

* Semester 1: Thank you for your kind course reviews and helpful suggestions.  The main thing you don't want is busy work.  While the reading and responding is essential work, the historical context and vocabulary list can easily be made to eliminate that kind of work this semester.  I kept that in mind as I looked over the kinds of strategies your class most needs for college preparation and to attack the AP exam.

* Increased analytical focus for this semester brings the following modifications:

1. The Brit Lit historical guide will be a resource for you to engage in when you need it but not tested material (except where notes are given in class). 
2. Your vocabulary will come directly from your reading.  You simply need to copy down the definition that applies to the context in question.  Note that in the text or on separate paper.  Minimum requirement: 10 words per week. 
3. Many short stories and poems chosen for range, depth, and sophistication.
4. Outside reading is more specified and organized with more opening assistance.

* Begin Chapter 1 of Perrine's Poetry in Class

• If you would like to buy a copy of this excellent text, you may find them for about $30-$50, used at abebooks.com: click here to see. 
• The ISBN is 9780155074941
• We will be reading from this text for much of this semester. 

HW: Answer assigned questions for chapter 1 on paper in a journal of your choice.  Be sure that all answers are complete and considerate.

• Title: Poetry Chapter 1 Reading Responses
• Use the title of the poem to divide your answers (each poem begins a new set of questions).
• In chapter 1, you will have two poems to respond to tonight: "The Eagle" and"Winter"