Again -- the American Creed revisited

You may recall that we asked what the American Creed was about three weeks ago for Journal 6. In this entry, Neil Postman's question: what is the American Creed and Spirituality?

One of our reasons for thinking about this due to the prevailing themes in early American (as well as most other cultures) writing that focused on the spiritual and religious. You will see that this is one of the themes pointed out in the slide show shared with you on Thursday.

Take a look at this article;

Why are increasing numbers of Americans declaring themselves as having “no religion”? Don’t automatically assume that a new wave of godlessness is sweeping the land, writes Christopher McKnight Nichols in the Fall 2009 issue of Culture magazine. Nichols attributes the trend to three different factors, none of them having to do with humanism, paganism, socialism, or Satanism taking over:
“First, over the past few decades there has been a marked trend toward sharper polarization among religious outlooks.” Nichols cites the rise of evangelical Christian influence under the George W. Bush presidency, but also the more recent emergence of polemic “new atheists” such as Richard Dawkins, Christopher Hitchens, and Sam Harris.
“Second, diverse changes on the geopolitical stage have had profound impacts on images of public religion.” Americans’ common enemy used to be the godless powers of Europe and Asia. Now we are chilled by the specter of Islamist extremists driven by a deep religiosity—and suddenly it’s not so clear whose side God is on. “No doubt there will be important consequences for American civic culture,” he writes, “now that affirming America’s godliness no longer servers to distinguish ‘us’ from ‘them.’ ”
“Finally, alienation from organized religion is growing for other reasons.” While Nichols is hard pressed to speculate on these reasons, he notes that while fewer of us are calling ourselves “religious,” more of us are calling ourselves “spiritual,” indicating a growing acceptance that the two are not synonymous—and that “one can believe in God and yet have no religion.”
Source: Culture (article available in PDF)

Extra Credit Opportunity

Event: Sound Unseen Local Shorts Program
      "Local films! Local music! Local!!"
What: Movie/TV Night
Start Time: Saturday, October 3 at 7:00pm
End Time: Saturday, October 3 at 9:00pm
Where: Oak Street Cinema

To see more details and RSVP, follow the link below:
http://www.facebook.com/n/?event.php&eid=144271829833&mid=12d5711G20d6b77bG37537ccG7

Give a summary of the films you saw, a program and ticket stub.

10 points towards journals

Thursday Am Lit/ BAV - Legend of Sleepy Hollow -- F. Douglass -- Syntax Analysis -- review 7.5

We will review the home work on 7.5 from the packet and then read the Legend of Sleepy Hollow together--

Written by Washington Irving in the early 1800s. They are presented to the reader as true tales from the collected papers of one Diedrich Knickerbocker. Both take place in the late 1700s and are placed in the Catskill mountains of upstate New York. Irving was an American romantic writer, so all of his writing has elements of the supernatural. His stories also exalt the natural world. Indeed, the The setting, with its rolling hills, deep, hidden valleys, rushing streams and rivers, and quiet ponds, lends itself well to the story which uses folklore and superstition to build their respective story lines. -- the Hudson River valley and the Catskill mountains are not only the setting for these tales, they are also characters in them

Let's read The Legend of Sleepy Hollow and the Postscript on the next page-- LINK to STORY  -- I will have print copies of the story in class, but you might want to read it at home too.


We will then take a paragraph and look at the voice regarding SYNTAX and voice regarding word choice, diction, and coordinating conjunctions and punctuation.

Choose a paragraph with a partner, choose a paragraph and see hao many compound sentences you find.

What do they do to the story?

Packet for compound sentences is due on Tuesday! 
Look for a POP - Quiz 

Study Guide Questions for Sleepy Hollow
Enotes for background

Audio for online listening or download to MP3

 BAV -- Black American Voices

Remember the key elements of this course are: voice, social justice, the American Creed, the role of education, and the the perspectives of those who might not have been invited to the table to be heard.

First published in 1845, the Narrative of the life of Frederick Douglass became Frederick Douglass's most well known work. It is as the name implies his autobiography.

Frederick Douglass was born a slave and underwent horrendous treatment at the hands of his owners. He later escaped to the north and became an outspoken abolitionist. Not only did he have a great life story to tell, his skill in telling it has long been admired. Douglass traveled throughout Europe lecturing about slavery.

After publication, the Narrative of the life of Frederick Douglass quickly became a best seller and within three years there were over 11,000 copies published in the United States, had been reprinted nine times and had been translated into two languages (Dutch and French). The book was so well written that some argued that an ex-slave could not be as articulate as Frederick Douglass demonstrated himself to be. Of course, Douglass did write the book and it stands today as a monument to the human spirit and what may be achieved with hard work no matter where in society somebody may begin.

Frederick Douglass had to leave the United States and flee to Ireland for a period after the books publication and its immediate success for some believed that Douglas' ex-owner Hugh Auld might try to get his "property" returned. After two years he was able to return to the United States after his freedom was purchased for $710 from Auld.

If you are interested in learning about the life of a great man who rose above his birth as a slave and became one of the greatest literary figures in American history, the Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass is the book to read.

 

From Chapter 1 -- key quotes

By far the larger part of the slaves know as little of their ages as horses know of theirs, and it is the wish of most masters to keep their slaves thus ignorant" (p. 21). [The intentional ignorance of slaves plays an important role in Frederick's understanding of the system.] (Education)

"He was a cruel man, hardened by a long life of slaveholding" (p. 24). [This is an important point that Frederick will continue to make throughout the narrative.] (History)

"It was the blood-stained gate, the entrance to hell of slavery, through which I was about to pass" (p. 25).

Study Guide for Frederick Douglass

Audio/ MP3 files for download

Early American Writing Blog

View more presentations from brock.dubbels.

Home work for Thursday Night -- Early American Lit

This slide show gives a beginning to our investigation of Early American Literature leading to our current current experience and expectations for the future.

Familiarize yourself with the time line by taking notes and listing important vocabulary and themes (ideas) from the slide show below -- expect a quiz on this and our packet on compound sentences and its contents.

Early American Writing Blog

View more presentations from brock.dubbels.

Wednesday -- Syntax -- Compound Sentences and beyond

You will need your notebooks here to create a series of outlines on SYNTAX.

You may remember that SYNTAX is an element of voice.

You will want to be ready for a mini-quiz on Syntax and compound sentences, coordinating conjunctions, punctuation, and what they mean in the sharing of ideas, as well as composing ideas as text.

Also, what is a text?

Today, get out your CORNELL Notes

We are going to be creating an organizer for elements of syntax and how it works with voice to recreate meaning working ahand-in-hand with punctuation, grammar, meter, themes, pitch, emphasis, and word choice.

All language, including slang, has syntax, grammar, and punctuation.

Language is cultural, political, and has a basis in power.

What are these syntax, grammar, and punctuation used to convey?

What might a coordinating conjunction do to influence meaning?

What are CCs?

Key words today: vernacular, dialect, slang, grammar, punctuation, coordinating conjunction, independent  clause, sentence types.




,    ;    --    .    . . . 


Know what these symbols are and represent, as well as what they do!

Let's read The Legend of Sleepy Hollow and the Postscript on the next page-- LINK to STORY  

Then we will see if we can identify some of the features listed above, and that you practiced in your compound sentences packet. 

Make sure to finish the compound sentences packet tonight as homework. 

Wednesday -- BAV -- SYNTAX -- Frederick Douglass

We are beginning the "Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass."

You have the book -- here it is online LINK

You should be looking beyond me and what I offer in class to see what other people say about him and learn what he was about. Do not come to trust and rely upon one source of information-- choose to extend yourself and invest your time and thought into things you do not know and in the process become more than yourself presently.

This, the act of learning, is becoming.

We have agreed that we will read the first chapter together, and that the compound sentences packet is due Thursday, October 1.

We will begin looking at VOICE -- especially SYNTAX -- to ready ourselves for our first quiz next Monday.

Redemption Monday

This image, by Pedro Bull is called "Redemption"

If you look carefully to the eye and whats comes from the back of the man and remember Dali it will look like Dali"s mustache and eye .

It is a portait of Dali's pride according to the artist

Let us redeem any points missed on Thursday's exam.

You will receive print-outs of your online exam and we will go over the questions.

You may correct your answers and describe why they are right to get half-credit on what you missed.

Compound Sentences

This is going to be our entry into syntax and grammar, as well as punctuation.

These three elements describe voice as static print to make voice come alive.

As we become aware of how they work in literature and conversation, we will begin to see how important they are for us to know -- and how easy they are!

We will start with compound and then learn other categorizations, as well as clauses and phrases as we go deeper into VOICE.

Make sure you take a packet and begin work on exercises 7.1 -- 7.3 and have them ready for class on Wednesday!

Don't be surprised if we have a quiz on these items.

If we have time, we can do a short relaxation and explore the role of breath in voice and oral reading -- and how this coincides with syntax and punctuation, as well as grammar.

Weird how it is all tied together -- I think it is cool and makes it easier to understand!

Coming out

Austin didn’t know what to wear to his first gay dance last spring. It was bad enough that the gangly 13-year-old from Sand Springs, Okla., had to go without his boyfriend at the time, a 14-year-old star athlete at another middle school, but there were also laundry issues. “I don’t have any clean clothes!” he complained to me by text message, his favored method of communication.

When I met up with him an hour later, he had weathered his wardrobe crisis (he was in jeans and a beige T-shirt with musical instruments on it) but was still a nervous wreck. “I’m kind of scared,” he confessed. “Who am I going to talk to? I wish my boyfriend could come.” But his boyfriend couldn’t find anyone to give him a ride nor, Austin explained, could his boyfriend ask his father for one. “His dad would give him up for adoption if he knew he was gay,” Austin told me. “I’m serious. He has the strictest, scariest dad ever. He has to date girls and act all tough so that people won’t suspect.”
Austin doesn’t have to play “the pretend game,” as he calls it, anymore. At his middle school, he has come out to his close friends, who have been supportive. A few of his female friends responded that they were bisexual. “Half the girls I know are bisexual,” he said. He hadn’t planned on coming out to his mom yet, but she found out a week before the dance. “I told my cousin, my cousin told this other girl, she told her mother, her mother told my mom and then my mom told me,” Austin explained. “The only person who really has a problem with it is my older sister, who keeps saying: ‘It’s just a phase! It’s just a phase!’ ” Read more

Your Friday Karaoke Serenade through the Stylings of Your Teacher Brock Dubbels

Lyrics | Burt Bacharach lyrics - What The World Needs Now Is Love lyrics

Reading Friday

Reading Friday

You know the drill friend . . . bring a book, read, and journal = 30 points

Love it.

Exam 1

Hour 1 Exam
Hour 2 Exam
Hour 3 Exam
Hour 4 Exam
Hour 6 Exam

When you are finished with the quiz, you can create your blog on Blogger.com and then take the timeline game  found here.

Our next steps in this class are to:

1. finish up the compound sentences packet -- look at how syntax, grammar, and punctuation inform voice -- yes, slang has all these things!
   
2. create a time line from the pre-colombian era to the present in class
3. look at where we are presently and go back to different eras and literary movements and genre exploring the socio-historic praxis (look it up) of America and determining what is American and what is an American Voice / For BAV, we will be looking primarily at what is a "Black American" voice.
4. We will being our unit on August Wilson's play Radio Golf October 5th.-- you will be allowed some choice in this as we will be exploring the role of space, place, culture, and narrative.
5. Please take the opportunity  to see the play!

We will be finishing up our compound sentences packet on Monday, Project Success will be here Tuesday.

Don't forget your book for Reading Friday!

Quiz Bowl 5000

Quiz Bowl 5000 

The Winner of  Quiz Bowl 5000 will be exempt from the quiz on Thursday and receive 20/10 for a quiz grade. To qualify they must score 96% as a group mean score, and if there is an intergroup tie, they will have a quiz bowl cage match.

2nd place: take quiz, 5 extra points

3rd place: take quiz, 3 extra points

All group quizzes must be in for quiz bowl to happen, otherwise we will combine classes to have a minimum of four quizzes per class section. 

Groups without a quiz are not able to participate except as a practice for the actual quiz.

Mid --Quarter reports on Friday

Be READY kid

House Cleaning

House Cleaning

Review of what has come before -- check student portals and blog for assignments

Submit review of progress and assignments to Brock so he can update your gradebook after a parent or guardian has reviewed this with you and signed-off.

When you have your assignment review finished, yous should begin your quiz review.

You will need to form a small group, no more than six people, and brainstorm possible quiz questions from the blog, packets, classroom discussions, and syllabus.

This quiz review form should be handed in. All group members should have a minimum of 5 good questions each with their name next to their contribution.

A good question will be:

1. Not obvious -- the student will not choose right from wrong answers, but choose from a range of answers from  "kind of right" to "right without a doubt"
   
2. Multiple choice or true false with all right and all decoy answers
3. The quality of your questions come from the use of context, description, and thought involved to answer them.

Hand in review packet for quiz from groups--beginning of class on Wednesday.

Jigsaw with other groups to see what questions were the best.

Create own quiz guide -- Journal 11

Begin work on the compound sentences packet when  finished with review and student progress sheet.

Here are the assignments that have been offered that need to be caught dealt with:

572937	Girl Cooperative Work		Projects		40		N	09/17/2009
572953	Girl Paper		Projects		40		N	09/18/2009
572922	Girl Presentation		Projects		32		N	09/16/2009
557816	J 1 World Traveler		Journals		10		N	09/01/2009
572917	J 10 RF		Journals		10		N	09/18/2009
574569	J 3		Journals		10		N	09/04/2009
574577	J 4		Journals		10		N	09/08/2009
574585	J 5		Journals		10		N	09/09/2009
574590	J 6		Journals		10		N	09/10/2009
564571	J 7		Journals		10		N	09/11/2009
572905	J 8 stage directions		Journals		10		N	09/17/2009
572910	J 9 Aud Group Evaluations		Journals		10		N	09/17/2009
557851	J2 Class Summary		Journals		10		N	09/03/2009
557932	Maori Mihi		Projects		50		N	09/03/2009
564558	RF Book		Practice Quizzes		10		N	09/11/2009
574324	RF Book		Practice Quizzes		10		N	09/18/2009
557864	RF Booki		Projects		10		N	09/04/2009
557873	SSR		Projects		10		N	09/04/2009
564563	SSR		Practice Quizzes		10		N	09/11/2009
574340	SSR		Practice Quizzes		10		N	09/18/2009
557806	Survey		Practice Quizzes		10		N	09/03/2009
557801	Syllabus QUIZ		Practice Quizzes		10		N	09/03/2009
573023	Zombie Haiku		Practice Quizzes		1		Y	09/18/2009

Quiz on September 24th -- online rm 148

Quiz 2 – 10 questions – 10 points

Vocabulary from packets, syllabi, and class

Make sure to look at blog for what we covered in class and the readings

The syllabus quiz is still fair game, as well as policy from the syllabus

Self-Care: bring a mat or towel

Monday is Self-Care day

The key to happiness is to know oneself.

When you know yourself, you can make choices that suit you.

In this activity, we will calm the bodies and minds and create a benchmark for who we are in our most relaxed state. You will be guided with breath and gentle stretching to ready yourself for the work ahead.

Try to extend this practice mindfully throughout your day.

Awareness and perception are important parts of who we are.

Enjoy every possible moment.

Reading Friday

 

 Reading Friday

Bring a book = 10 , borrow = 7

Read silently for 40 minutes = 10 points, -1 for each redirect

Journal 10 = 10 points -- summarize what you read 1 page skip every other line 

Journals due at beginning of hour for scoring 

Assignment: Document of Script, Interpretation, and Stage directions -- includes assignment description and scoring doc

When you performed your play, you told a story, you need to create a document that is like a script that will hook your audience with the intro (an intro has a minimum of 3 sentences), and then go into characters, script and stage direction, and then finally, the closing paragraph where you explain your interpretation.

 We will be in lab 261 for hours 1, 2, 3, and 4


We will be in lab 150 on Friday for hour 6

The paper is due at the beginning of the hour Friday  9/18/09

Here is the ASSIGNMENT Description to guide you in format and to use the key terms as well as the original assignment description.

Do not forget that you have already done several journals for the prewriting elements on the rubric; you already have stage directions in your journal from class. 


It includes a description, key terms, the poem, rubrics, and a template for your paper with exemplars.


Do not forget to include your 8 terms in describing your intentions and message in your final paragraph i.e.







Dialect A particular variety of language spoken in one place by a distinct group of people. A dialect reflects the colloquialisms, grammatical constructions, distinctive vocabulary, and pronunciations that are typical of a region. At times writers use dialect to establish or emphasize settings as well as to develop characters.

Diction An author’s choice of words based on their correctness, clarity, or effectiveness.

Mood The feeling or atmosphere that a writer creates for the reader. The use of connotation, details, dialogue, imagery, figurative language, foreshadowing, setting, and rhythm can help establish mood.

Point of view The vantage point from which a story is told. In the first person or narrative point of view, the story is told by one of the characters. In the third person or omniscient point of view, someone outside the story tells the story.

Journals assignments current to Friday, 9/18/09

This is a list of your journal assignments:

Journal 1 -- dinner party (bon voyage) traits
Journal 2 --  class activity reflection
Journal 3 --  Reading Friday Summary
Journal 4 -- group names; 10 lines from poem
Journal 5 -- agree to lines w/ group consensus
Journal 6 -- Narratives, America, and Education
Journal 7 -- Reading Friday Summary
Journal 8 -- Stage directions
Journal 9 -- Group Evaluations
Journal 10 -- Reading Friday

Journal 9 -- Auditorium

For journal 9 you should score groups presentation and then give them a score from the rubric with your reasoning for each category.

What ten lines are they using?.

Zombie Haiku Contest Extra Credit

Create a Zombie Haiku for 10 extra credit points towards quizzes

A haiku is composed with a meter of 5, 7, 5

You should post your haiku as a comment to this post.

Here are examples:




I need me some brains
Clearly you're not using yours
Can I borrow it?

Hello, may I come in?
I promise not to kill you.
*CHOMP* Sorry, I lied.

I look to the brains
The hunger builds within me
I want to eat brains

Racism in DNA Profiling

From the Utne Reader
9/3/2009 4:21:03 PM

 by Bennett Gordon

Tags: Science and Technology, Politics, DNA, criminal justice, GeneWatch

As of January 1 of 2009, the state of California has the right to take a DNA sample from everyone arrested in the state, analyze it, and stick the profile in a criminal database. This applies whether or not the person is ever convicted or even charged with a crime. According to Michael Risher in GeneWatch, the new law allows “a single law enforcement officer the power to place people under lifetime genetic surveillance. “
The new law could also magnify racial disparities in the criminal justice system. “Given the ubiquity of racial profiling” in this country, Risher writes, “people of color will largely populate the databanks.” This places people of color under increased scrutiny from the law for the rest of their lives. He writes, “a racially skewed databank will produce racially skewed results.”

Surveys for revision

Surveys for 9/2/09
These surveys are not a quiz like the syllabus quiz, but an inventory for you to share how you feel and what you know. This is not graded.
American Lit Hour 1
American Lit Hour 2
American Lit Hour 3
Black American Voices Hour 4
American Lit Hour 6

Happy Monday

 

Journal 8

Create stage movements -- consider what setting where your scene/s should take place.

Use vocabulary at end of packet to describe how the play should look, sound, and feel

• What is the mood?
• Identify patterns in diction -- where is she from?
• Whose point of view.

Use EIGHT of the terms from the packet.

The final document you create should include the background to your interpretation -- what steps of understanding did you go through? 

• Did your interpretation change?

• Is your interpretation a reconsideration of the poem (connotative) or a strict interpretation (denotative).

List the lines from the poem and then the script and staging including mood, tone, and any movement. 

Last, create a description explaining what you were trying to communicate abou tthese characters and the content.

School Quality and Soft Measures -- boys bathrooms

Soft Measures

You don't always need a standardized test to know a school is in trouble. Just look in the boys' john.

By: Folwell Dunbar 

Whenever I evaluate a school, my first stop is the boys' bathroom because, without an unflushed urinal of doubt, it is every school's least common denominator. Its sticky floors, calcified wads of toilet paper and juvenile-yet-timeless graffiti ("Here I sit broken hearted...") are generally not what a principal shows off. Then again, I once visited a school run by the Knowledge is Power Program — which focuses on preparing students in underserved communities for college — and found fresh cut flowers next to an automatic recycled-paper-towel dispenser. At another school, there were toilet targets. (Apparently, research shows that they increase accuracy by as much as 70 percent.)

My all-time favorite positive indicator, though, was a school that posted weekly "Stinky Animal Fun Facts" in the stalls and on the walls. For example, did you know that dung beetles, using polarized moonlight for navigation, roll up balls of No. 2 to use as nurseries for their babies? This school's educators saw even the potty break as a teachable moment. Read more

Why People Believe in Conspiracies

From the September 2009 Scientific American Magazine

After a public lecture in 2005, I was buttonholed by a documentary filmmaker with Michael Moore-ish ambitions of exposing the conspiracy behind 9/11. “You mean the conspiracy by Osama bin Laden and al Qaeda to attack the United States?” I asked rhetorically, knowing what was to come.
“That’s what they want you to believe,” he said. “Who is they?” I queried. “The government,” he whispered, as if “they” might be listening at that very moment. “But didn’t Osama and some members of al Qaeda not only say they did it,” I reminded him, “they gloated about what a glorious triumph it was?”
“Oh, you’re talking about that video of Osama,” he rejoined knowingly. “That was faked by the CIA and leaked to the American press to mislead us. There has been a disinformation campaign going on ever since 9/11.”
Conspiracies do happen, of course. Abraham Lincoln was the victim of an assassination conspiracy, as was Austrian archduke Franz Ferdinand, gunned down by the Serbian secret society called Black Hand. The attack on Pearl Harbor was a Japanese conspiracy (although some conspiracists think Franklin Roosevelt was in on it). Watergate was a conspiracy (that Richard Nixon was in on). How can we tell the difference between information and disinformation? As Kurt Cobain, the rocker star of Nirvana, once growled in his grunge lyrics shortly before his death from a self-inflicted (or was it?) gunshot to the head, “Just because you’re paranoid don’t mean they’re not after you.”
But as former Nixon aide G. Gordon Liddy once told me (and he should know!), the problem with government conspiracies is that bureaucrats are incompetent and people can’t keep their mouths shut. Complex conspiracies are difficult to pull off, and so many people want their quarter hour of fame that even the Men in Black couldn’t squelch the squealers from spilling the beans. So there’s a good chance that the more elaborate a conspiracy theory is, and the more people that would need to be involved, the less likely it is true.
Why do people believe in highly improbable conspiracies? In previous columns I have provided partial answers, citing patternicity (the tendency to find meaningful patterns in random noise) and agenticity (the bent to believe the world is controlled by invisible intentional agents). Conspiracy theories connect the dots of random events into meaningful patterns and then infuse those patterns with intentional agency. Add to those propensities the confirmation bias (which seeks and finds confirmatory evidence for what we already believe) and the hindsight bias (which tailors after-the-fact explanations to what we already know happened), and we have the foundation for conspiratorial cognition.Read more

Reading Friday

 

Bring your book!

• 10 points to bring -- 7 points to borrow
• 10 points for SSR
• 10 points for journal summary (we are on journal 7) 

Edugami

The idea of public education depends absolutely on the existence of narratives and the exclusion of narratives that lead to alienation and divisiveness."

". . . public education does not serve a public. It creates a public. And in creating the right kind of public, the schools contribute toward strengthening the spiritual basis of the American Creed."
                                                                                    ~ Neil Postman

Journal 6

In this course we are actively investigating narratives and how their presence, or absence,  can lead to unity or alienation when narratives are excluded.

Postman says there are two contradictory beliefs that form the narrative of what it means to be human, to be a citizen, and to be intelligent:

• Schools must teach the young to accept the world as it is -- the rules, the constraints, and prejudices.
• The young should be taught to be critical thinkers, to become of an independent mind, with the strength and skill to change what is wrong. 

What is the "right" kind of public, what is school for,  and what might Postman mean by the s"spiritual basis of the American Creed"?

Interpretation and Scripting

It is important that you identify the voice of your narrator as you choose the most important sentences -- utterances-- from the poem.

After you have identified the sentences most important to you, come together as a group and begin to share you sentences and decide as a group which ones should be performed and how.

The key here is supporting your interpretation from the text or connecting to experiences outside of the poem to your life, or the lives of others to share or convey experience and ideas.

Once you have decided which lines you will perform, begin to script and choreograph each line.

1. decide how you will present it
2. who will present it
3. how it will be presented
4. with what props and movement
5. why it should be done this way -- what are you trying to convey/communicate? 

Tuesday gather and brainstorm

Barbell Factory
Create initial groups ( 4 to a group)
Cooperation and group scoring
Key vocabulary featuring voice
Girl Assignment -- choose, interpret, and perform the ten most important sentences.


Ten most important sentences--make sure you get this part.

Give evidence for your interpretation of connotative and denotative.  

There is no correct interpretation -- get your evidence from the poem and secondary sources. 

It is important to get background information ans secondary sources
Please visit Jamica Kincaid's biographical page and her wiki to see what you can learn about her and how these secondary sources might influence your literal and figurative interptretations of the poem "Girl".

Brainstorming
What really counts in making brainstorming sessions effective is your ability to ignite, encourage, synergize and extend your partner thoughts and ideas without ever spending useless energies in criticizing or vetoing this or that proposal.



All ideas are good, they are only limited by our own ability to connect them rapidly with other, relevant ones to create mental mashups or to jump to alternative solutions we wouldn't have considered otherwise.


Brainstorming from Johnson & Johnson 

Here are the roles you should take on: 

ENCOURAGER and SCRIBE
writes and reports groups ideas;
is not a gatekeeper

• Record all ideas
• Don’t block
• Seek clarification
• Report

ENCOURAGER and STORE KEEPER
locates, collects and distributes resources including informational resources like web pages and encyclopaedia entries

• Get all the materials for the entire group
• Collect worksheets from the teacher
• Sharpen pencils
• Tidy up

*Allowed to leave your place without teacher permission

ENCOURAGER and COP
reads instructions and directs participation

• Read the instructions
• Call for speakers
• Take turns
• Call for votes
• Count votes
• State agreed position

ENCOURAGER and SPY
summarises findings and trades ideas with other groups

• Check up on other groups
• Trade ideas with other groups
• Summarise findings

*Allowed to leave your place when directed by the teacher

"No task is too big when done by all"

If you read the front page story of the SF Chronicle on Thursday, Dec.
14, 2005, you would have read about a female humpback whale who had
become entangled in a spider web of crab traps and lines. She was
weighted down by hundreds of pounds of traps that caused her to
struggle to stay afloat. She also had hundreds of yards of line rope
wrapped around her body - her tail, her torso, a line tugging in her
mouth.

A fisherman spotted her just east of the Farralone Islands (outside
the Golden Gate) and radioed an environmental group for help. Within a
few hours, the rescue team arrived and determined that she was so bad
off, the only way to save her was to dive in and untangle her - a very
dangerous proposition. One slap of the tail could kill a rescuer.

They worked for hours with curved knives and eventually freed her.
When she was free, the divers say she swam in what seemed like joyous
circles. She then came back to each and every diver, one at a time,
and nudged them, pushed them gently around-she thanked them.

Some said it was the most incredibly beautiful experience of their
lives. The guy who cut the rope out of her mouth says her eye was
following him the whole time, and he will never be the same.

May you, and all those you love, be so blessed and fortunate----to be
surrounded by people who will help you get untangled from the things
that are binding you. And, may you always know the joy of giving and
receiving gratitude.

A'ohe hana nui ke alu'ia "No task is too big when done by all"
Proverb from 'Olelo No'eau

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Important Sundry Items

Sundry (yes, you should look it up).

Key themes and topics:
Voice & Oral traditions
Diversity and notions of text and media
Important vocabulary
Literary interpretation
Performance
Literal and Figurative
Connotative and Denotative
Cooperative work

Activities
Clapping Academy
Barbell Factory
Reading Friday
Literary Yoga & Self-care
Maori Mihi

Thursday: How you say it is just as important as what you say.

Guiding questions:
What is equity? What is voice? What is a text?

Key vocab

Voice --context and expression through:

syntax, meter, diction, word choice, themes, volume, pitch and emphasis.

Go over syllabus quiz
Clapping Academy -- equity
Image interpretation -- a text conveys information. Can be pictures, clothing, dance, words.

Class activity reflection (Journal 2):
What did you do? Was it fun? What was the point? Why? How will you use these ideas?
Full sentences / minimum 1 page/ skip every other line.

Friday
Reading Friday -- Bring a book!
Yes, a book of your choice.
10 points for bringing a book, 7 for borrowing.
10 points for 40 minutes of silent reading (-1 for each redirect).
10 points for journal entry
Literacy coaching

Monday -- No School

Tuesday
Barbell Factory
Create initial groups ( 4 to a group)
Key vocabulary featuring voice
Girl Assignment -- choose, interpret, and perform the ten most important sentences. 
Give evidence for your interpretation of connotative and denotative. 
It is important to get background information ans secondary sources
Please visit Jamica Kincaid's biographical page and her wiki to see what you can learn about her and how these secondary sources might influence your literal and figurative interptretations of the poem "Girl".

Wednesday
Girl cont'd

Thursday
Lab 148 finish Mihi

Friday
Reading Friday