Parent Teacher Conferences / Regionalism / Personal Response

I would like to thank all the parents that showed up at parent teacher conferences last night.  I see students and other teachers all day and it's extremely helpful to get another perspective on what is going on in the classroom.  I took a lot away from the conferences: both a sense of what is going well and an understanding of how to help students who might be struggling in my classes.  Please feel free to contact me at anytime - input is always appreciated!

English 11 - We spent time at the beginning of class going over the test together.  The reading comprehension tests I have been giving students have been challenging and I wanted to model the types of reading strategies students should be using when they take the test.  These reading strategies are essential for performing well on college entrance exams (SAT and ACT) and performing well in college, in general.  We spent the rest of class laying the groundwork for our trip downriver with The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn.  First, we spent some time discussing regionalist authors and their goal of representing locales by recreating the landmarks, vernacular, and personalities of an area.  We then watched a short video of Hal Holbrook portraying Mark Twain and reading some material that Mark Twain wrote.



AP - The students spent class working on incorporating personal responses into their essays.  One of the AP prompts that they will have to write on will draw on this skill.  I also wanted students to reflect on their personal knowledge of the topic they will be writing about in their first take-home essays.  For the activity, they took an essay they had read and wrote 200-300 words on how the argument the essay was making aligned with their personal experience.  I am looking forward to seeing the results in-class today.

Test Day / Kyoko Mori

English 11 - Today was a test day, so I don't have too much to report.  Tomorrow we begin our trip down the Mississippi with Mark Twain!

AP - We opened up class by practicing our rhetorical analysis skills on an essay written by Kyoko Mori.  In the essay, Mori dispels myths about Japanese education and argues for an education system that, as one group of AP students explained, values both honesty and explanation.   In comparing American and Japanese education system, Mori found that American educators were not fully honest with students about their failings while Japanese educators did not clearly explain to students why there were making the mistakes they were.  I personally enjoyed reading the essay and working through it with students, and I think that, in many ways, it pulls together some of the disparate strands of education essays we read so far.  The rest of class we spent doing some preliminary work on an essay students will be completing over the next few weeks.

On Tuesday, I forgot to discuss outside articles my students had read.  We spent some time discussing a few that they come up with. Unfortunately, I left our list of topics at school so I will put them up tomorrow instead.  I spent time talking about the unexpected developments that came up when we investigated the use of chemical warfare in Laos after the Vietnam War:

Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl / Academic Arguments

English 11 - We worked with Harriet Jacobs's Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl.  Incidents is a slave narrative just like the other two pieces we recently read by Frederick Douglass and Olaudah Equiano.  A key difference though is that Jacobs tells the story from a female perspective.  As a result, the slave narrative puts a larger emphasis on the importance of family and the household.  Since American literary history too often becomes dominated by male authors, frequently the important stories about American domestic life and values get swept under the rug and we end up lauding the tales of rugged individualism.  Harriet Jacobs' slave narrative is one of many alternate stories of slavery and the Civil War that provides a great contrast to a traditionally masculine story.  Interestingly enough, the most important and best-selling novel of the time was written by a woman (Harriet Beecher Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin).  In fact, it was so important that Lincoln called Stowe the "little woman who wrote the book that made this Great War".  To get at this piece, we looked at similarities and differences between Stowe's account and the accounts offered by Equiano and Douglass.  This activity helped us get at the material, but it also helped students develop analysis skills (compare and contrast) that are key for standardized testing, college success, and career success.

AP - We opened up class by working on substituting action verbs for linking verbs.  Linking verbs simply link the subject with a noun or adjective in the predicate (I am an AP English teacher).  Substituting action verbs can make sentences more engaging and direct (I teach AP English).  This small technique should liven up student writing and help bump up AP scores while also arming students to tackle college-level writing tasks.  For the rest of class, we looked at the definition of academic arguments.  Academic arguments are different from most arguments we encounter in our daily lives because they are heavily-researched arguments that target a small group of experts.  For example, the many essays I read about teaching composition are aimed at composition teachers and as a result focus on the issues of our field and make use of a very technical vocabulary.  They look much different than the blog posts I make or the descriptions of activities I would give students, parents, and even other English teachers that do not teach composition.  Understanding how academic arguments work  and how they are different from most other argumentative writing is key to college success since most of the writing students will do is academic writing inside of their own field.

Collaboration / Rhetorical Analysis

On Friday, we closed off some old work and laid the ground for new work while Homecoming went on around us.

English 11 - A majority of the class day was devoted to collaboration.  Today's students don't have to keep vast amounts of information in their heads, but instead need to know how to work with other people to get information and use it.  One of our big goals is an essay that will make an argument for why The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn is called a great American novel.  In order to evaluate Huck Finn as emblematic of American literature, we need to have a good idea of what makes American literature unique.  In order to do that, we've been gathering notes on all that we have read.  Today, we spent time sharing and swapping notes and I emphasized the higher rate of success students could achieve by collaborating as a group on such an ambitious project.  While the average student might only have time to write down and summarize a handful of quotes, the class has twenty or thirty times more time to gather information.  Pooling together this information will give student more to draw on when they set about writing their essays.

AP English - We spent the day looking at the rhetorical analysis essays they completed.  We graded and critiqued model papers.  Then, I passed on some notes on what major problems came up in the essays students completed.  Students closed off the day by grading their own essays and then looking at the grades and feedback I provided.

Developing Arguments / Rhetorical Analysis

English 11 - For the block periods, we focused on moving to the next step in the writing process.  So far, we have primarily concentrated on taking good notes and developing effective critical reading skills.  During the block periods, we started using those notes.  First, we built a paragraph together out of our notes on Olaudah Equiano's Interesting Narrative of the Life.  As we constructed the paragraph, I pointed out the students that the writing they do in college and their careers will increasingly rely on their ability to effectively coordinate and synthesize evidence and rely much less on them consistently providing their own opinion.  We closed off class by connecting a quote from Frederick Douglass's Narrative of the Life to other works we had read in the class so far.  Students used the notes they already compiled to do this exercise and I pointed out  that the exercise will come in use when we go to write our essay on Huckleberry Finn over the course of the next month.

AP - The students continued to work on the rhetorical analysis essay during the block period.  We finished evaluating responses to the Florence Kelley speech and then discussed some strategies for effectively attacking the AP rhetorical analysis essay. Students then completed an in-class AP rhetorical analysis essay.  We used the prompt from last year and for homework students are scoring 8 essays that students around the country turned in.  During class on Friday, we will look at what scores the students would give the sample essays and their own.

Equiano / Rhetorical Analysis

English 11 - Today, we began looking at slave narratives - the first person accounts of enslaved blacks who escaped or were released from captivity.  These narratives are incredibly important in helping us understand both our country's history and its literary character.  Slave narratives give us peeks into the experiences of slaves, but also helped develop American literary traditions that one typically does not associate with slavery.  For example, one of the major tropes of American storytelling is the story of escape - be it from society or enslavement.  The heroic journey out of slavery and captivity paves the way for everything from Thoreau's Walden to contemporary movies like Iron Man.  Additionally, the horrors of the Middle Passage, the bizzare tortures used by slaveholders, and the hiding and confinement experienced as the slave escaped greatly informed the horrors of American Gothic writers like Edgar Allan Poe, Herman Melville, and Nathaniel Hawthorne.  Today, we started working with Olaudah Equiano's Interesting Narrative of the Life and got a peek into the barbaric nature of the slavetraders who oversaw the Middle Passage.  Equiano's piece is most famous for the way it reverse the script - instead of following the white traveler who encounters uncivilized and possibly cannibalistic blacks, Equiano depicts the black standing on the shore who encounters uncivilized and possibly cannibalistic white traders.  We will be diving into the piece more tomorrow and working on transforming out notes into a well-written academic paragraph.

AP - The AP exam asks students to flex their writing skill by writing three different kinds of essays in two hours.  So far, we have been working on the rhetorical analysis essay and today we began preparing for our first in-class AP rhetorical analysis essay.  We looked at the 2011 prompt that asked students to analyze a political speech by Florence Kelly.  First, we attacked it on our own and pointed out some ideas the we might bring up if we completed that essay.  Then, we looked through the rubric and discussed it.  I sent students home with three sample essays to score which we plan on going over tomorrow.   Getting to the rhetorical analysis essay has been a slow, steady process, but I have been extremely happy with the development that I've seen so far.  Hopefully, they'll be confident when they tackle a different prompt tomorrow.

Before AP class started, we discussed some articles that the students had read over the weekend.  I am highly encouraging that students read long-form non-fiction and news of high reading level as they prepare for the exam and I plan to post links to anything they bring up here so other students can grab a hold of it.  Nothing will be better for our class than maintaining an air of heightened academic discussion and debate that continues on outside of the classroom and provides additional preparation for students when they tackle the AP test.   Today, we talked about the leaked Mitt Romney comments and Salman Rushdie's discussion of the fatwa put on him after he published The Satanic Verses.

Poe / Sedaris

I'm posting a little bit late this weekend.  Hope all of my students are enjoying their extra day off!

English 11 - We spent the day working with Edgar Allan Poe's "Pit & the Pendulum".  We spent time doing some close reading and then generated diagrams of the tortures the narrator was put through so we could better get at the story.  I thought all of these class periods went great and that we had some great conversations about what Poe might be trying to tell us about life, death, dreams, and everything in between.  One of my students has been asking me for the reasons why humans laugh so I have posted a link to a Radiolab podcast on the subject below:



AP - I spent the beginning of the class period catching my students up on some grammar and good study habits.  I gave them a handout on the various types of phrases and clauses that I thought might prove helpful to look at as they worked through the class.  We also talked about good strategies for greatly increasing your reading score.  I pointed out that students who wanted to do much better than they were currently should focus on developing their reading, writing, and study skills.  For reading, I suggested that they read non-fiction texts of a high-school or higher reading level on a regular basis.  Here are a few good places where students can read texts of this type: New York Times, Wall Street Journal, Washington Post, New Yorker, and Longform.  For writing, I suggested that they work on emulating the sentences constructed by good writers they read as a way to bump up their prose.  For study skills, I suggested they cross-pollinate and study with people inside class that they didn't typically study with.  Meeting new people and seeing how they study can be an easy way to pick up new habits that will make you more successful.  For the rest of class, we worked with David Sedaris's "Me Talk Pretty One Day" and listened to a short clip from one of his many appearances on This American Life.  A link to the full episode can be found below:

What We Know / Hard at Work

English 11 - For the block days, we spent a majority of our time looking at the limits of knowledge we have as people locked inside mortal, temporal bodies.  In other words, we spent time thinking about how our understanding of the world is limited by our position in time and space.  This conversation and work served as a transition point between Nathaniel Hawthorne's "The Minister's Black Veil" and Edgar Allan Poe's "Pit & the Pendulum".  Both of these short stories function by playing with the horror of the unknown.  To start class off, we listened to a podcast from Radiolab that discussed how our knowledge of the world is dependent upon waves (sound, light, etc.) hitting our bodies and giving us information.  In particular, the episode focused on the delay between the event happening and the wave hitting us.  The podcast can be found below:
Also, here is a video for my students that are interested in watching the slinky in action:

We then went outside and wrote for a while about the things we don't know.  We found out that we don't know a lot.  In fact, there's probably more that we don't know than that that we do know.  Even scarier is that fact that there's a lot that we don't know we don't know.  The exercise helped us better get at Poe and Hawthorne, but it also provided students with a writing process for attacking difficult assignments.  A key strategy for writing an essay about something you know little about is making lists of what you don't know so that you can search out that information or at least make a plan for how you will go about finding it.  We concluded by starting Poe's "Pit & the Pendulum" and having a long discussion about the nature of sleep, dreams, and reality.  A link to a This American Life podcast on the subject can be found below:

AP - On Wednesday, we set to work.  The students took a quiz and completed an in-class writing assignment that asked them to rhetorically analyze a segment of Bill Clinton's speech at the Democratic National Convention.  These activities helped me get a better sense of how students are progressing in terms of mastery of key concepts and development of writing skills.  Over the two days, I have been pounding through their notebooks and getting a good sense of where we are going to need to go and the types of work we are going to need to do over the next few weeks.  A video clip of Bill Clinton's speech can be found below:

Minister's Black Veil / James Baldwin

English 11 - Today, we continued to work with Nathaniel Hawthorne's "The Minister's Black Veil".  Students gathered textual evidence for the first part of class and then we worked through it to get a better idea of how the veil worked as a symbol inside of the short story.  We came to a number of great conclusions.  The veil could symbolize the degree to which we depend on external appearances to determine how we understand people.  It could also symbolize the body that we are trapped behind and the secret thoughts and ideas we hide behind it.  Most of the class discussions went great and tomorrow we are going to build on them as we do some free writing and start working with Edgar Allan Poe's "Pit and the Pendulum".

AP - For the whole of class, we focused on doing a rhetorical analysis of James Baldwin's "Talk to Teachers".  Baldwin's piece was published in 1963 and it urged the teachers of black children to educate them in a way that would allow them to be critical of the fallacies and inequities in their society.  Baldwin felt that too frequently America was praised for its excellence while it allowed many of its citizens (especially its black citizens) to be marginalized or taken advantage of.  For our rhetorical analysis, we worked on defining and categorizing his argument and then looking at how he used the rhetorical appeals to better sell his message. 

Here's a video of James Baldwin talking about education:



Here is a video him debating William F. Buckley:


James Baldwin was one of my favorite authors in high school and at the beginning of college.  Here is a link to one of his most famous short stories "Sonny's Blues".

American Gothic / Logos / Parallel Structures

English 11 - Today, students were introduced to the American Gothic tradition.  The American Gothic tradition provides a stark contrast to the American Romantic tradition we have been studying.  While the American Romantics depicted a rational world filled with hope and optimism, the American Gothic writers painted an irrational world filled with darkness and depravity.  We started reading through Nathaniel Hawthorne's "Minister's Black Veil".  As part of reading this text, we are looking at how to analyze symbols in literature.  To do this analysis, students are closely following one object (the veil) and seeing how it crops up and operates throughout the text.  This activity while help students understand how items take on more than literal meanings, but it will also show them how to closely follow an idea throughout a text.  This technique can help them better grasp concepts in science, math, and other disciplines.

Here is an audio version of the text:



AP - We spent most of today putting together notes on the appeal to logos and parallel structures.  The appeal to logos is the final appeal in the set of appeals (ethos, pathos, logos) and focuses on primarily the logical argumentation that the speaker makes about the topic.  We went through the different types of logical argumentation and looked at how speakers can make use of different types of hard evidence and logical structures.  After covering logos, we turned to parallel structures.  Recognizing parallel structures will better help students do rhetorical analysis, but it also helps them spruce up their writing and make it stronger.  I posted the lecture notes here for both lessons.

Here's a video that might help students quickly review the rhetorical appeals and how to apply them:

Test / Future of College Education

English 11 - Today, we took our first quiz.  This quiz was most likely different than most of the tests students are used to as I was less interested in memorization skills and more interested in reading comprehension skills.  The scores were a bit lower but I added an extra two points for everyone so that it would even things out.  Grades aren't the only reasons for quizzes; they are also designed to give me an idea of what students can and cannot do effectively.  Looking over the results of the quiz, I can see that determining the definition of a word based on context is an important skill we will have to develop over the next few weeks.

On a side note, at the beginning of class the students discovered that I am a little color blind and I have difficulty discerning between purple and blue.  Interestingly enough, blue is a recent development for human eyesight and the Ancient Greeks were incapable of seeing the color blue and instead saw it as purple or green.  This podcast from Radiolab offers an explanation for how this fact was discovered and the reasons why it is true.



AP - We continued working with our summer reading and analyzing the appeal to ethos.  For the opening of class, I asked students to identify moments where the authors appealed to ethos and then we analyzed how effective Richard Rodriguez and Mike Rose were in making their appeals.  I thought the conversation brought up some of the important strengths and weaknesses of both texts. For the second half of class, we continued working on developing an understanding of different arguments being made about education.  Since in a few weeks the students will be writing their own arguments about education, I've tried to make them more and more aware of the different controversies and developments in the field.  Today, we looked at the future of online education by analyzing Daphne Koller's "What We're Learning from Online Education":


The video points out just how dramatically the field of education is changing.  With information so readily available and technology that can target the learning of all students becoming increasingly cost-effective, the need for the lecture-based classroom is diminishing.  While Koller uses these new developments to mainly make a case for the website Coursera, I think the argument can also be made that we need to dramatically re-think what classrooms look like.  Is the classroom a place where lecture notes are given or where we practice inquiring into new knowledge?  I think the latter is ideal and every day I work on transitioning my classroom into a place of inquiry, activity and critical thinking because I know it is what will serve students best in the long run.

Valedictiorians / Resistance to Civil Government

English 11 - Today, we continued to work with Henry David Thoreau's Resistance to Civil Government.  We spent a good portion of the time closely examining a few passages so we could really get a good grasp on the ideas that Thoreau was putting out there.  Thoreau argues that governments do not physically exist and are instead just a set of traditions people agree to follow.  In other words, the reason we don't steal is not because there is a law that will punish us, but because as a group we do not steal and we designate people to punish those who do.  If laws only work so far as people follow them, then Thoreau points out that we can get rid of laws we do not agree with by simply refusing to follow them and then accepting the consequences.  If enough people choose not to follow or enforce the laws on principle, then the law will no longer function.  Thoreau puts this logic into action by not paying his taxes so that he is not forced to pay for the Mexican American War or the slave rebellions that were put down in his time.  I really enjoy this reading and I find that some of Thoreau's ideas can be really helpful in understanding how classroom activities operate.  To be honest, my classroom functions only to the point that we all decide to do the activities and follow the rules.  Everyone needs to see that what we do is in their best interest, otherwise the activities we do or the rules we set fall apart.

Here is a video of famous actor Mark Ruffalo reading Thoreau's essay:



AP - We opened up class by working with "Best in Class" by Margaret Talbot applied some of our rhetorical analysis to it (categorizing and describing the argument, identifying appeals to ethos and pathos).  Talbot's essay is one of the many we have been reading lately on education.  Talbot looks at the controversy surrounding valedictorians and the intense number-crunching law-suit heavy culture that has sprung up around it.  She explores our options - should we leave the valedictorian award the way it is, reform it, or just remove it?  We spent the rest of class analyzing, talking, and writing about the rhetoric of speakers during the current Democratic and Republican National Conventions.  I was really happy with the level of analysis that I saw students doing and their descriptions of the messages speakers were trying to make and the types of appeals they made to sell their messages to the audience.  I, at times, noticed the level of polished analysis that I would expect from an article in the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, or New Yorker.  We definitely seem to be making some good progress.  Here are links to the two speeches we spent time working with:

Ethos / Resistance to Civil Government

English 11 - Today, we worked with Henry David Thoreau's Resistance to Civil Government.  Students worked on summarizing a short passage by themselves and then collaborated with students who had also worked on the same passage.  This reading ended up being more difficult than I predicted so we scheduled extra time the next day to focus on it in detail.  The essay is primarily Thoreau's reflection on being thrown in jail for not paying the poll tax that went to support the continuance of slavery and the Mexican American War.  Thoreau's writing can be dense and dated, but his arguments can be heard all the time in modern American speeches.  Thoreau argued that all governments should be striving to govern as little as possible - that they should be working in a way that all people would voluntarily follow the rules because it was in their own best interest and that a government should seek to do little enforcement.  He saw the wars and policies of the American government of his time as being either immoral or in the best interest of a few and believed that his disobedience allowed him to protest the errant policies of his time.

Here is a video that provides some background on the Mexican American War that might help you understand better what Thoreau was so upset about:



AP - We started off by looking at how we could best incorporate short, simple sentences and fragments into our writing.  Contrary to what many students are told, fragments can be used in writing as long as they are used effectively.  In fact, many of our most famous political speeches make use of fragments as a way to emphasize major ideas.  To conclude the activity, we revised a past essay to look at how incorporating fragments and short, simple sentences could make arguments even stronger.  We spent the second part of the class focusing on the appeal to ethos.  The appeal to ethos is the part of the speaker's argument where she attempts to convince the audience that she is trustworthy and reliable.  As I pointed out to the students, one of the biggest parts of running for public office is appealing to ethos.  Frequently, our contemporary media focuses less on getting speakers to discuss policy at length and instead on cultivating images of themselves as likeable and trustworthy.

This video from The New York Times provides some insight into just how much work can go into the appeal to ethos that a candidate might make.

Labor Day / Civil Disobedience

I got caught up in Labor Day weekend before I could post a description of Friday's activities.   Hope everyone else had a relaxing break like me, here's a quick rundown of what we did to finish off last week:

English 11 - We spent Friday talking about civil disobedience in order to prepare for reading Henry David Thoreau's Resistance to Civil Government.  As I found out, my students hadn't had too much experience with civil disobedience.  To get them better prepared for the reading and the ideas it would present, we watched a few video and talked about whether civil disobedience was appropriate and if so, when was it appropriate and in what form.  Asking these questions before reading can help make the reading of a difficult text like this one go more smoothly since, as readers, we will come to the text with an understanding of its primary issue and the questions we ourselves have about that issue and are trying to find answers for.

Here are two videos we used to prime ourselves for a discussion of civil disobedience:



 

AP - In AP English, we worked again with the summer reading assignments and evaluated them for appeals to pathos.  We also had a discussion on appeals to pathos and their prevalence in political speeches.  I strongly encouraged the students to watch the Republican and Democratic National Convention so they could get practice doing analyses of political rhetoric.  Almost every year, there is an entire essay on the AP exam devoted to analyzing the rhetoric of a political speech.