Your Grades are Posted

If you have a creative writing piece for me, please email it: marcusschwager@gmail.com. Also, I will probably be changing the address of this blog for next year to make it easier to type in, etc. It will probably be longbowsong.blogspot.com...but we will see. The longbow reference is from Tales of the Longbow by G.K. Chesterton. I have in mind to start a literary society: The Longbow Literary League. Enjoy, Mr. S

All the best!

Final Day of AP English Literature

* Pray: 1 John: "Little children, keep yourselves from idols." This ties into your novel and ties up the year.  

*  iPad check in. Please:
1)     Remove passcodes.
2)     Tape your name to the iPad.
3)     Stack your iPad by the door.

* Please return any books you've borrowed.

* Any questions?

* Final Paragraphs

* When done, please answer these questions on a sheet of paper:
1.  What went well in my course?  What was good?  What are my strengths?
2.  What didn't go well in my course?  What didn't work?  What are my weaknesses?
3.  Books to change?  Explain.
4.  How about the blog?  iPads?  Focus?
5.  What does MVCS need to do to improve?

Reminder of the chief things we covered: College essay, elements of writing, AP test preparation (cards, m.c., etc.), Lewis, Beowulf, Chaucer, Shakespeare, Austen, Dickens, Perrine's, Conrad, Quo Vadis (Esolen)

Tea party

All the best,

Mr. Schwager

Monday, 5/21/12: Last Readings

* Pray

* Return Papers.  Any makeup or correction work must be turned in by Wednesday, 2:00 pm.

* Esolen and Lewis

* Note the finals post

* Did you turn in your exit form to student services?  Did you turn in your addressed, stamped envelope for your final transcript request?

* You may vote for the graduation name readers: https://www.surveymonkey.com/s/X6DRS8L 

HW: Review

Urendi Maleldil: Final exams--how N.I.C.E.!

The Final Exam

1. Please finish your outside reading novel (Heart of Darkness or Crime and Punishment).

2. Bring both That Hideous Strength and your outside reading novel to class for your final.

3. You will answer two questions in class with paragraphs.

4. We will enjoy our last tea party following your paragraph responses. Comment to the blog what you will be bringing.

5. Please email your favorite piece(s) of creative writing from this year. I will add them to the blog I keep so next year's students can see them. Format for body of email text:

a. Title (no quotes or underlines, etc.)

b. Text

c. Your name

__________________________________________________


From That Hideous Strength

"His education had had the curious effect of making things that he read and wrote about more real to him than things he saw. Statistics about agricultural laborers were the substance; any real ditcher, ploughman, or farmer's boy, was the shadow. Though he had never noticed it himself, he had a great reluctance, in his work, ever to use words as 'man' or 'woman.' He preferred to write about 'vocational groups,' 'elements,' 'classes' and 'populations.': for, in his own way, he believed as firmly as a mystic in the superior reality of the things that are not seen (87).

"For the Hideous Strength confronts us and it is as in the days when Nimrod built a tower to reach heaven" (288).

"On the floor lay a large crucifix, almost life size, a work of art in the Spanish tradition, ghastly and realistic. 'We have half an hour to pursue our exercises,' said Frost looking at his watch. Then he instructed Mark to trample on it and insult it in other ways" (334).

"Those who have forgotten Lorgres sink into Britain. Those who call for Nonsense will find that it comes" (372).

"He said something about being mirrors enough to see another" (362).

Friday, 5/18: Esolen

* Pray

* I read

* You read

HW: Read HoD or C&P

Thursday, 5/17: Quo Vadis

* Pray

* Esolen

HW: Read

Wednesday, 5/16: Quo Vadis

* Pray

* Quo Vadis

- "Life is a fairytale written by the hand of God." - Hans Christian Andersen

- Who are you?  What character do you play? Where are you going?  What is important about this world?

- "The world is charged with the grandeur of God" - G.M. Hopkins
            - Because God is wonderful, the world, your life, is wonderful.  Others are wonderful.  This is a key distinction for us to keep in mind when confronting a "crooked and perverse" generation. 

Comparisons

If I set the sun beside the moon,
And if I set the land beside the sea,
And if I set the town beside the country,
And if I set the man beside the woman,
I suppose some fool would talk about one being better.

            -G.K. Chesterton

HW: Read Heart of Darkness; please return all books and M.C. tests

Last Book: Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad

* For iBooks, go to the store.  Type in "Heart of Darkness."  It will be the first title you see...plain blue cover.

* If you want an online site to read from: http://www.gutenberg.org/cache/epub/526/pg526.html

Schedules

Tuesday, 5/15

* Pray

* Video

* I apologize that I've fallen behind.  I've had many technical issues that slowed me, but I am working my way back up.  Here is a list of things that I will be entering shortly:

Card Quizzes (10 pts. each)

• Austen
• Shakespeare: Tragedy
• Shakespeare: Comedy
• TTC

Writing

• CWP (20 pts.)
• J42- Heaney, 1990 (15 pts)
• J43 "Century Quilt," 2010 (15 pts)
• Samuel Johnson, 1991 (15 pts)
• That Hideous Strength (not required due to so many people being gone, etc.; up to 5 pts. extra credit for those who turn it in by Wednesday)

M.C.

• 2008 (curve to ~ 45)
• 1999 (if complete, full credit; if corrected, extra credit)
• 1991 (curve to ~ 40)

HW: Outside Reading

Monday: 5/14

* Pray

* Review

* Esolen

* Video

HW: Outside Reading

Rogation Days: "To Ask"

Rogation Days: "To Ask"; in England, this was a traditional time to ask God for mercy on their lives and crops and such (Mon.-Wed.).  Priests would walk the perish and pray for blessing over all within.  For Mother's day, each of us chose something for mom, and we planted it.  My contributions were cut flowers indoors and an eastern cultivar red bud tree for the front...she loves the red bud. 

Mother's Day Poem

AP Short Stories

Tragic Sweetness

* "A Worn Path" by Eudora Welty

• Beautiful, strange, heroic

Darker Tales

* "The Destructors" by Graham Greene

• Excellent, dark tale 

* "A Good Man is Hard to Find" by Flannery O'Connor

• Another excellent piece.  You should read at least one short story by O'Connor before you leave MVCS.

* "The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber"  by Ernest Hemingway

• You know this guy from last year

* "Hunters in the Snow" by Tobias Wolff

•  Warning: Explicit content

  * "The Swimmer" by John Cheever

• Strange cautionary tale

 * "The Rocking-Horse Winner" by D. H. Lawrence

• Stranger cautionary tale

* "Young Goodman Brown" by Nathaniel Hawthorne

• Allegorical cautionary tale

Block Day, Week 39: The Time for more fun...has come!

Congratulations!

Let's watch A Knight's Tale! 

* Note: iPad Network problems.  The wifi is fine.  The problem was this, you can't just turn off the wifi and then turn it back on, you have to "forget" the mustang wireless in your settings.  Then join it again. 

Why?  Actually, it's because the wireless is so good, it gets a weak signal from that class on the other side of campus...just enough to make your life miserable.  So you have to make it forget that part of the network and join that part that's closer to the room you're now in.  Make sense?  Go forth and conquer!

Allusions in _That Hideous Strength_

LEWISIANA.NL

Quotations and Allusions

in C. S. Lewis, That Hideous Strength

compiled by Arend Smilde (Utrecht, The Netherlands)

...I consider a happy ending appropriate to the light, holiday kind of fiction I was attempting. The Professor has mis­taken the ‘poetic justice’ of romance for an ethical theo­rem.

–– C. S. Lewis on J. B. S. Haldane’s critique of That Hideous Strength

...it appears confused only so long as we are trying to get out of it what it never intended to give. It becomes intelligible and delightful as soon as we take it for what it is – a holiday work, a spontaneous overflow of intellectual high spirits, a revel of debate, paradox, comedy and (above all) of invention, which starts many hares and kills none. ... There is a thread of serious thought running through it, an abundance of daring suggestions, several back-handed blows at European institutions ... But he does not keep our noses to the grind­stone. He says many things for the fun of them, surrendering himself to the sheer pleasure of imagined geography, imagined language, and imagined insti­tutions. That is what readers whose interests are rigidly political do not understand: but everyone who has ever made an imaginary map responds at once.

–– C. S. Lewis on Thomas More’s Utopia

Wednesday, May 9: AP Prep.

* Pray

* Extra Essay help: I created a box to the right with a few handouts for writing.  Beautiful, good, and true, is a stepped approach to understanding imaginative literature (poetry, fiction, and drama) that I created for my students.  The two form-based overviews beneath it give you a starting point if you find yourself utterly lost when attacking a passage. 

* The card quiz and essay have been combined!  Hurrah!

Prompt: Plan and write well-crafted essay relating key elements to a controlling idea communicated in this passage:

"Frost had left the dining room a few minutes after Wither. He did not know where he was going or what he was about to do. For many years he had theoretically believed that all which appears in the mind as motive or intention is merely a by-product of what the body is doing. But for the last year or so – since he had been initiated – he had begun to taste as fact what he had long held as theory. Increasingly, his actions had been without motive. He did this and that, he said thus and thus, and did not know why. His mind was a mere spectator. He could not understand why that spectator should exist at all. He resented its existence, even while assuring himself that resentment also was merely a chemical phenomenon. The nearest thing to a human passion which still existed in him was a sort of cold fury against all who believed in the mind. There was no tolerating such an illusion. There were not, and must not be, such things as men. But never, until this evening, had he been quite so vividly aware that the body and its movements were the only reality, that the self which seemed to watch the body leaving the dining room and setting out for the chamber of the Head, was a nonentity . How infuriating that the body should have power thus to project a phantom self!

Thus the Frost whose existence Frost denied watched his body go into the ante-room, watched it pull up sharply at the sight of a naked and bloodied corpse. The chemical reaction called shock occurred. Frost stopped, turned the body over, and recognised Straik. A moment later his flashing pince-nez and pointed beard looked into the room of the Head itself. He hardly noticed that Wither and Filostrato lay there dead. His attention was fixed by something more serious. The bracket where the Head ought to have been was empty: the metal ring twisted, the rubber tubes tangled and broken. Then he noticed a head on the floor; stooped and examined it. It was Filostrato’s. Of Alcasan’s head he found no trace, unless some mess of broken bones beside Filostrato’s were it.

Still not asking what he would do or why, Frost went to the garage. The whole place was silent and empty; the snow was thick on the ground by this. He came up with as many petrol tins as he could carry. He piled all the inflammables he could think of together in the Objective Room. Then he locked himself in by locking the outer door of the ante-room. Whatever it was that dictated his actions then compelled him to push the key into the speaking tube which communicated with the passage. When he had pushed it as far in as his fingers could reach, he took a pencil from his pocket and pushed with that. Presently he heard the clink of the key falling on the passage floor outside. That tiresome illusion, his consciousness, was screaming to protest; his body, even had he wished, had no power to attend to those screams. Like the clockwork figure he had chosen to be, his stiff body, now terribly cold, walked back into the Objective Room, poured out the petrol and threw a lighted match into the pile. Not till then did his controllers allow him to suspect that death itself might not after all cure the illusion of being a soul – nay, might prove the entry into a world where that illusion raged infinite and unchecked. Escape for the soul, if not for the body, was offered him. He became able to know (and simultaneously refused the knowledge) that he had been wrong from the beginning, that souls and personal responsibility existed. He half saw: he wholly hated. The physical torture of the burning was not fiercer than his hatred of that. With one supreme effort he flung himself back into his illusion. In that attitude eternity overtook him as sunrise in old tales overtakes and turns them into unchangeable stone."

HW: Study some; rest much.  Your test is tomorrow.  Be there by 7:50.  Per. 3 is in the new art/old ceramics room.  Per. 1 and 6 are in the ARC.  Bring pencils, pens, erasers, and water.

Tuesday, 5/8: AP Prep.

* Pray

* Collect M.C. 1991

*  Card Quiz: A Tale of Two Cities

* Wednesday's Quiz: That Hideous Strength

* In Class: Passage Essay: 1991


Question 2. (Suggested time —35 minutes.)

Read the following passage from The Life of Samuel Johnson by James Boswell. Then, in a well-organized essay, discuss the ways Boswell differentiates between the writing of Joseph Addison and that of Samuel Johnson. In your essay, analyze Boswell’s views of both writers and the devices he uses to convey those views.

It has of late been the fashion to compare the style of Addison and Johnson, and to depreciate, I think very unjustly, the style of Addison as nerveless and feeble, because it has not the strength and energy of that of Johnson…. Addison writes with the ease of a gentleman. His readers fancy that a wise and accomplished companion is talking to them; so that he insinuates his sentiments and taste into their minds by an imperceptible influence. Johnson writes like a teacher. He dictates to his readers as if from an academical chair. They attend with awe and admiration; and his precepts are impressed upon them by his commanding eloquence. Addison’s style, like a light wine, pleases everybody from the first. Johnson’s, like a liquor of more body, seems too strong at first, but, by degrees, is highly relished; and such is the melody of his periods*, so much do they captivate the ear, and seize upon the attention, that there is scarcely any writer, however inconsiderable, who does not aim, in some degree, at the same species of excellence.

         * sentences


* Return yesterday's short essay

* Return 1991

HW: Practice Essay (J43, see below); That Hideous Strength card quiz tomorrow; 

* Next Green Sheet Essay while I score your last
       a.  complete assignment and receive 100%
       b.  receive a 2010 green sheet
       c.  read both passage prompts and choose one to work from
       d.  go to focus and read the example essays
       e. J43: WRITE YOUR OWN ESSAY USING ALL YOU NOW KNOW...but don't just rewrite the 9 or 8, please.

Here is the poem prompt (you'll have to look at the green sheet if you choose the passage prompt):

2010 Poem: “The Century Quilt” (Marilyn Nelson Waniek)
Prompt: Read carefully the following poem by Marilyn Nelson Waniek. Then write an essay analyzing how Waniek uses literary techniques to develop the complex meanings that the speaker attributes to The Century Quilt. You may wish to consider such elements as structure, imagery, and tone.

The Century Quilt
for Sarah Mary Taylor, Quilter

    My sister and I were in love
    with Meema’s Indian blanket.
    We fell asleep under army green
    issued to Daddy by Supply.
5    When Meema came to live with us
    she brought her medicines, her cane,
    and the blanket I found on my sister’s bed
    the last time I visited her.
    I remembered how I’d planned to inherit
10    that blanket, how we used to wrap ourselves
    at play in its folds and be chieftains
    and princesses.

    Now I’ve found a quilt*
    I’d like to die under;
15    Six Van Dyke brown squares,
    two white ones, and one square
    the yellowbrown of Mama’s cheeks.
    Each square holds a sweet gum leaf
    whose fingers I imagine
20    would caress me into the silence.

    I think I’d have good dreams
    for a hundred years under this quilt,
    as Meema must have, under her blanket,
    dreamed she was a girl again in Kentucky
    among her yellow sisters,
    their grandfather’s white family
    nodding at them when they met.
    When their father came home from his store
    they cranked up the pianola
30    and all of the beautiful sisters
    giggled and danced.
    She must have dreamed about Mama
    when the dancing was over:
     lanky girl trailing after her father
35    through his Oklahoma field.
    Perhaps under this quilt
    I’d dream of myself,
    of my childhood of miracles,
    of my father’s burnt umber* pride,
40    my mother’s ochre* gentleness.
    Within the dream of myself
    perhaps I’d meet my son
    or my other child, as yet unconceived.
    I’d call it The Century Quilt,
45    after its pattern of leaves.

1 A quilt is a type of bedcovering often made by stitching together varied pieces of fabric.
2 Burnt umber is a shade of brown.
3 Ochre refers to a shade of yellow.

AP Test Study Reminders

* Review Elements (terms)

* Review Previous M.C. Tests.  Take an extra exam if you are below 30 on any recent test:  2006 is posted along with the key.  It will not be assigned is purely for you to use as you wish.  Note that it only has 46 questions...so shoot for 25 or more correct.

* Review your memorization cards

* Review the literary timelines

Blessings,

Mr. S

* Pray

* Return Papers

* Period 3 only: Your AP Test location has been changed to the new art center (where ceramics was).  This will give you (and those in the ARC) more room and quiet.  Please be there by 7:50 on Thursday morning.

* Essay: Passage prose or passage prompt response (choose the one you need more practice with) (~20 min.).  Read; plan for 5 min.  Write for 10-15.  Goal: get more than one page written.  

* Check 1999.  Average score: 30/53.  Typical high score range: 38-45.

* Begin 1991 (~25 min.)

* Tomorrow's Card Quiz: A Tale of Two Cities

HW: Finish 1991 (the test will be on Focus)

For Monday

* Take the 1999 M.C. (on Focus). Score it (key on Focus).  Make corrections for extra credit.

* Study terms and prompts. 

* Monday's card quiz is cancelled (I have some of your TTC cards).

Congratulations, MVC Baseball!

on Wednesday's big win over Monterey!

extra selections for M.C.

2004 Released test: 55 q.

• “Suppose that people live forever...” from Alan Lightman's Einstein’s Dreams (1993)
• “The old books, Virgil, Euclid, and Aldrich...” from George Eliot's The Mill on the Floss
• “The Albuquerque Graveyard” by Jay Wright
• “Criticism is a study by which men grow important and formidable at very small expense....” by Samuel Johnson
• “Then hate me when thou wilt, if ever, now” by William Shakespeare (Sonnet 90)

   
1994 Test: 55 q.

• “The Sunday morning service began when Brother Elisha sat down...” from James Baldwin’s Go Tell it on the Mountain
• “My Picture” by Abraham Crowley
• “If mere parsimony would have made a rich man, Sir Pitt Crawley might have become very wealthy...” from William Thackeray’s Vanity Fair 
• “A Whippoorwill in the Woods” by Amy Clampitt (1990)

1991 Test: 55 q.

• “The station wagons arrived at noon, a long shining line that coursed through the west campus...” from Don DiLillo's White Noise
• “I have been studying how I may compare/This prison where I live unto the world” from Shakespeare; Richard deposed and imprisoned by Bolingbroke.  Richard II, Act V. 
• “Lady with a Falcon” by May Sarton (1978)
• “The mountain paths stoop to these glens in forky zigzags” from John Ruskin’s Modern Painters

What did I read on the M.C. test? AP M.C. Selections

List of M.C. Selections from the Warchest (55 questions = normal; 46 questions = unofficial practice)

2009 Released test B: 55 q.

• “Patty’s Charcoal Drive-in” by Barbara Crooker
• "Hunger" from Charles Dickens' A Tale of Two Cities
• “The Imaginary Iceberg” by Elizabeth Bishop
• “The fresh harrow-lines seemed to stretch like the channellings...” from Thomas Hardy's Jude the Obscure
• “To an Inconstant One” by Sir Robert Ayton. 1570–1638

---------------------
Extra 2009 
Skip (part repeat from ’82)
    Practice A: 46 q.
    “Certainly the religious and moral ideas of the Dodsons and Tullivers...” from George Eliot’s The Mill on the Floss
    “Advice to a Prophet” already done in 1982...1959 by Richard Wilbur
    “What had been wanted was this always, this always to last, the talking softly on
    the porch, with the snake plant in the jarderiere...” Gwendolyn Brooks
    “The Eolian Harp” by Samuel Taylor Coleridge
--------------------------


2008 Released test: 55 q

•  “To George F. Babbitt, as to most prosperous citizens of zenith...” from Sinclair Lewis’ novel Babbitt
•  “To Autumn” by John Keats
•  “The name ‘New York’ glittered in front of her like the silver in the shops...” from Gwendolyn Brooks' only novel Maud Martha
•  “Read history: so learn your place in Time” by Norma Millay Ellis (1954)
•  “There are not many people—and as it is desirable that a story-teller and a story-reader should a mutual understanding...” from Charles Dickens' novelette The Chimes (a goblin story)

2006 Released practice: 46 q

• “Mr. Jones, of whose personal accomplishments we have hitherto...” from Henry Fielding's Tom Jones
• “Sestina” by Elizabeth Bishop
• “Of late years an abundant shower of curates have fallen upon the North of England...” From Charlotte Brontë's Shirley.
• “The Habit of Perfection” by Gerard Manley Hopkins

2004

• "Suppose that people live forever": Alan Lightman, 1993. 
• "The old books": George Eliot, 1860. 
• "The Albuquerque Graveyard": Jay Wright, 1987. 
• "Criticism is a study by which men grow important": Samuel Johnson, 1759.

1999 Test: 55 q.

• “CYRIL. (Coming in through the open window from the terrace)” from Oscar Wilde's The Decay of Living 
• “I dreaded that first Robin, so” by Emily Dickinson
• “VOLPONE: Good morning to the day; and next, my gold” from Ben Jonson's Volpone
• “Facing It” Yusef Komunyakaa (1988)
• “Louisa heard an exclamation and a soft commotion...” from Mary E. Wilkins Freeman's A New England Nun

           

1994 Test: 55 q.

• “The Sunday morning service began when Brother Elisha sat down...”
• “My Picture” by Abraham Crowley
• “If mere parsimony would have made a rich man, Sir Pitt Crawley might have become very wealthy...”
• “A Whippoorwill in the Woods”, 1990 by Amy Clampitt

           

1991 Test: 55 q.

• “The station wagons arrived at noon, a long shining line that coursed through the west campus...”
• “I have been studying how I may compare/This prison where I live unto the world” from Shakespeare; Richard deposed and imprisoned by Bolingbroke
• “Lady with a Falcon” 1978 by May Sarton
•  “The mountain paths stoop to these glens in forky zigzags”

           

1982 Test: 55 q. 

• “A Dialogue Between the Soul and Body” by Andrew Marvell
• “If the only form of tradition, of handing down, consisted in following the ways of the immediate generation before us in a blind....” from T.S. Eliot's, Tradition and the Individual Talent (1921)
• “Advice to a Prophet” by Richard Wilbur (1959)
• “I sometimes dream of a larger and more populous house, standing in a golden age...” from Henry David Thoreau's Walden

Week 38 Block: AP Prep.

* Pray

* Shakespearean Tragedy Card Quiz

* CWP (or evidence) collection

* Note the new resources on Focus.  M.C. tests and green sheet awesomeness!

M.C. Schedule

Lear: Done
Austen: Done
1982: Done
2009: Done
2004: Done
2008: Friday
1999: Weekend homework
1991: Monday
1994: We will see; perhaps Tuesday Night

2006: Extra Unassigned Online with key now available (46 questions).

* M.C. 2008

* You may turn in corrections for 2004 on (but not after) Monday

* Poetic Rhythm and Meter Lesson: Ch. 12 of Perrine's (Poetry Section), pg. 915.
Scanning Review Slideshow (.ppt)

* ICE work (green sheets)

HW: Practice M.C. Test on Focus.  Answers are also available.  Score it when you are done.  Give me your score on Monday.  You will get 100% for doing the assignment.  You will get extra credit for doing test corrections on this one.

Wednesday, 5/2: AP Prep.

* Pray

* Card Quiz: Shakespearean Comedy

* Review Heaney

* Collect J42

* Don't forget your CWP

* AP M.C.

* Tomorrow's Card Quiz: Shakespearean Tragedy

HW: CWP