Is it really November? I have my doubts. But....I'll take it. More vitamin D, less sweaters.
Freshmen are knee deep into their theme papers and doing fabulous. I love their genuine interest and keen sense of doing their due diligence. All are using the Graphic Organizer. They're grappling with crafting inviting hooks to engage a reader. They're complicating their theme statements to demonstrate a high school sophistication, of which they are all capable. And, yet, those same statements are clean and clear. Sounds like a paradox, but it's true. We've decided to use Mon/Tues, Nov. 9/10 to complete our papers. Phew! Just squeaked it in before the end of Qu 1.
Juniors in Rhetoric are trying to wrap up old and missing assignments (especially ones that are point-heavy, such as our Rhetorical Analysis of the Soda Ban). For that reason, we took a hiatus from our logical fallacies. Many juniors struggle with reading with a critical eye: the difficult essay, the complex article, the advanced text. They're are slowly learning that, sometimes, analytical reading is rereading! Some found the text understandable from the start and were good to go on annotating, charting, answering questions and planning a specific response to explain the writer's rhetorical choices. In this way, the class was largely divided down the middle. The former group will need more practice at rhetorical reading before doing additional rhetorical writing. And that's OK. We're all at different stages of our developmental learning. They'll get there.
Seniors in Lyric class are pumped to be turning in their final Unit 2 Performance Task (a comparison between Modern Art and Free Verse Poetry) because now we launch into Unit 3: Songwriting. First up: What's in a Name? Tackling song subjects through a common and specific name. Do you remember 'Roxanne'? 'Tom Sawyer' by Rush? Or 'Sweet Baby James' by James Taylor? Then you're hip to what we're delving into.
And here you thought you had lost your aura of cool. Never.
