Argumentative Structures / Pap Finn

English 11 - We worked through Chapters 4-7 of Huck Finn today.  Students brought in quotations that lined up with a reading focus (American Romanticism, American Gothic, Slave Narratives, Regionalism).  In groups, they shared the quotations they had identified and slowly compiled a set of notes that they then entered into the computer.  These notes will end up getting compiled into a larger document that students will use to write their first paper. We spent most of today working out mechanics and looking at few passages.  Our discussion was limited but we get time to focus on Pap Finn's discussion of the government.  While Pap Finn is primarily characterized as drunken selfish fool in the novel, his discussion of the government is at times reminiscent of Henry David Thoreau's critique of the government in Walden.  Both of these individuals believe that the government that governs best, governs least.  Interestingly enough though, Pap Finn's ramble about the governments quickly descends into a racist speech where Pap demands that the government remove a freed slave's right to vote and re-enslave him.  The juxtaposition of these two statements reveals something about the story of early American history - on one level, it can be seen as the story of individuals who persevered without the help of government; on another level, it can be seen as the story of individuals who persevered thanks to the government's support of expansion and slavery.

AP - We slogged through three types of argumentative structures.  This period was a difficult period for students and I am planning on adjusting around it.  Hopefully, students came out with a basic understanding of Classic Oratory and Rogerian Arguments.  I also hope they came out with some understanding of how claims, reasons, and warrants are connected.  For AP students who are still unclear on how the three connect, here is one of the three examples from pg.191 of Everything's An Argument:

Claim: The federal government should ban smoking.

Warrant: The Constitution was established to "promote the general welfare," and citizens are thus entitled to protection from the harmful actions of others.

Reason: Smoking causes serious diseases in smokers and endangers nonsmokers as well.

Verbs / Arguments / Huck Finn

English 11 - We started working with Huck Finn today.  First, we reviewed the genres of American literature that we had talked about so far this year - American Romanticism, American Gothic, slave narratives, and regionalism.  I then walked through parts of the first four chapters and show how Huck Finn managed to bring in elements of all four.  As we move through the novel, the students will take over this exercise.  Tonight, they are looking at the next three chapters and focusing on one of the four genres.  I hope it will lead to some interesting conversations tomorrow. Working with students always brings out parts of the novel I miss and ideas I have never considered.

AP - We worked at the beginning of class on bring more precise verbs into our rhetorical analysis papers.  Too frequently, students make use of verbs that are very imprecise such as "says" or "uses".  I provided students with a sheet of more precise verbs and we worked on substituting in worlds like "examines", "defines", "points out", "criticizes", etc.  The rest of class was devoted to looking at argumentative structures.  Students tend to be more accustomed to five-paragraph formats and the three forms we looked at provide more mature academic frameworks for tackling arguments.  The students worked in groups to create an argument using one of the frameworks.  I'm looking forward to hearing all of them tomorrow.

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.