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: