Self Reliance / Walden

We just finished up our block days so the following posts cover both Wednesday and Thursday classes.

 English 11 - We started off class by going over essays the students wrote on individual quotes from Emerson's "Self Reliance". Emerson's text can be difficult so breaking it up into pieces allowed us to harness the thought power of everyone in the room. We shared our writings and I provided some additional information so we could get at a better understanding of what Emerson's essay is all about. By the end, we managed to get to the core of Emerson's argument - society corrupts the individual and the individual succeeds based on her own merits. These two ideas are huge in American society and American literature and we see them repeated over and over in American films, TV shows, books, and political speeches. We spent most of the rest of the class looking at passages from Henry David Thoreau's Walden. Walden recounts Thoreau's time spent following Emerson's advice - Thoreau lived on his own out in nature and survived off the fruits of his own labors. To get at the passages, we broke them up, wrote about them, shared in groups who read the same passage, and then taught others who had different passages. Doing the activity this way, allowed us to go over passages multiple time and get both breadth and depth with the selections. Over the course of our discussion, we reflected on how our lives were run by the technology we use and society we form, our insignificance when compared to the entirety of time and space, humans' incapability to every fully understand nature, and the benefits of breaking routine and following our dreams.  We also talked about railroads, the immensity of the universe, ant fights, and loons.  Here are some links that I promised during class.

Here is the Radiolab podcast that talks about the advances in measuring time that came with the arrival of the railroads.  The podcast is about time in general - the talk about railroads starts at around 10:50.

Here is the Radiolab podcast about ants.  Below is a video of ants fighting to give you a better idea of what Thoreau was looking at:

And here is Neil DeGrasse Tyson saying some cool things about space that may help you understand why Emerson and Thoreau found it so amazing.



Also, here is a scale model of the universe provided by one of my students so you can see just how big we are compared to everything else.

AP - The students took their first test on Wednesday.  The test was challenging, but it showed me quickly where the class was having difficulties and where they were grasping material effectively.  I'm going to use the test to inform my instruction as we work over the next few weeks.  I hope the test also gave students a taste of just how demanding the AP test will be and gave them a peak at how developed their critical reading skills will have to be.  We also spent some time writing on a quote from Richard Rodriguez.  Once again, the focus was working closely with a short argument so that critical reading and writing skills could be developed before we started attacking writing on longer passages.  I also thought the discussion helped us work with a more controversial argument (affirmative action, minority designation) and better develop skills for critiquing an author's argument and articulating our own arguments.