Nature / Appositives / Pathos

English 11 - Today, the students worked with Chapter 1 of Ralph Waldo Emerson's essay "Nature".  This essay can be pretty challenging so we worked through it slowly.  Each student worked on summarizing a paragraph of it in their own words and then compared summaries in a group.  They then shared with the class and I provided support and feedback about the group's summary.  This activity should have helped develop close critical reading skills.  I really enjoyed working with this passage - it's one of my favorite in American Literature.  In it, Emerson conveys his feelings about the awe-inspiring power of nature.  Too frequently, we walk by parts of nature and treat them as ordinary; Emerson asks us to treat them as extraordinary, as awe-inspiring as the moment when we first saw them as children.  If we treat nature this way, we can experience moments of transcendent joy - moments when we forget our pasts and identities and instead just experience a terrifying awe of nature.  In this essay, Emerson introduces the image of his ideal poet - the invisible eyeball uplifted into space that can see everything but maintains no personality.  Of course, such an experience is difficult, if not impossible, to maintain everyday, but as Emerson points out experiencing it for brief moments sometimes will give us a glimpse of just how unimportant most of our conflicts are.  I enjoyed working with students on this extremely difficult piece, and I am looking forward to working with his ideas more as the week goes on.

AP - We focused on getting some extra tools for analyzing rhetorical pieces and strengthening our writing.  We opened up with a lesson on appositives.  Appositives, when used properly, can strengthen writing immensely by making it less choppy and more clear.  They allow us to present more information about a noun without having to rely on extra sentences that seem redundant or present information too late.  After the work with appositives, we focused on developing an understanding of pathos.   When authors appeal to pathos in their arguments, they appeal to our emotions by connecting with our experience, heightening an argument through emotional language, or using humor to soften us up.  Pathos is frequently used for persuasion - getting us not only to believe something, but also to act.  One of the most clear appeals to pathos can be seen in an example brought up in class - Sarah McLachlan's advertisement for the Humane Society.  The images of sick and wounded animals are supposed to convince us not just that animals are in need, but push us to act by donating.  The advertisement is linked below.