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: