Seniors, September 8th

We checked out copies of Pride and Prejudice today and closely read the first chapter. In addition to our own dramatic reading of the dialogue between Mr. Bennet and Mrs. Bennet, we compared clips from the 2005 and 1995 versions. We focused especially on characterization and Austen's use of dialogue and narration to establish indirect and direct characterization, respectfully.

I showed you this family tree, which may be helpful as you do your reading this weekend.

Update: I temporarily lost my mind and put Kitty as the youngest; it's Lydia! Thanks to those who read closely and noticed. This is the corrected family tree:

For Monday, you're reading the article from this month's issue of The Sun magazine I handed you titled "The Radical Idea of Marrying for Love" and you'll read through (inclusive of) chapter 13 in the text.

While you read, you're flagging for love and marriage, social class, and letters (actual letters sent between characters, not letters of the alphabet used to construct words and sentences).

Sophomores, September 6th and 7th

We spent most of our class period today thinking about and discussing literacy. In addition to writing about and discussing our ideas, we read an excerpt from a chapter called "Reading the World" that had a very expansive definition of what literacy means.

We started a section of our notebooks for literary terms, and "literacy" was the first one to make the list.

In support of exploring different forms of literacy, you traveled around the room to several literacy stations and wrote about the form of literacy and the symbol systems you encountered. Our de-brief of the stations included a discussion of the literacy communities that might be represented by these different types of literacy.

Next time, you'll start working on your first assignment for this class. It's related to literacy communities, so be ready to name a few you think you belong to and the terminology associated with each community.

Seniors, September 6th

We thought a lot about literary criticism and theory today. We began by thinking about perspective and how implicit biases shape out understanding of the world and interpretation of art objects.

Here's a couple links to the art we looked at from artist Bernard Pras:

His website
An article about his work

We worked with formalist, reader-response, didactic, mimetic, and expressive theories by practicing our criticism skills with a Mary Oliver poem and object analysis.

Next time we'll check out Pride and Prejudice and begin thinking about formalist features of a novel and how Austen uses them.

In support of our 7th period voting that our norms should be on a document viewable and accessible from home, here is a link to the Google Doc with our classroom norms: Click here for 7th period norms

In addition to being accessible online, a copy will be displayed in the room to remind us what principles guide us in our work.