10/31 and 11/1

In class today, we:

• Used the Vendler chart to analyze either "Spelling" or "On the Subway"
• We read our outside reading book for 30 minutes

The homework is to go to the Poetry Outloud website and choose three poems who have "news" that you think is important. Please print a copy of each of these three poems and bring them to class next time. Happy Halloween!

Homework for class 10/25 and 10/26

Read the Atwood poem below for homework. Once you have read the poem annotate the poem for its argument about reading and writing. Then compare and contrast the argument this poem makes about reading and writing to Douglass' argument and to Malcolm X's argument.

Bring all of the pieces to class on the next class.

Spelling      by   Margaret Atwood

 

My daughter plays on the floor with plastic letters, red, blue & hard yellow, learning how to spell, spelling, how to make spells. I wonder how many women denied themselves daughters, closed themselves in rooms, drew the curtains so they could mainline words. A child is not a poem, a poem is not a child. there is no either/or. However. I return to the story of the woman caught in the war & in labour, her thighs tied together by the enemy so she could not give birth. Ancestress: the burning witch, her mouth covered by leather to strangle words. A word after a word after a word is power. At the point where language falls away from the hot bones, at the point where the rock breaks open and darkness flows out of it like blood, at the melting point of granite when the bones know they are hollow & the word splits & doubles & speaks the truth & the body itself becomes a mouth. This is a metaphor. How do you learn to spell? Blood, sky & the sun, your own name first, your first naming, your first name, your first word.

Due on 10/21 or 10/24

Please make sure you have read chapters X and XI in Douglass. You should bring your books and notes to class for the in class analysis work.

10/14 Blocks 3 and 5

Today in class:

• We read the except from "Aunt Phyllis' Cabin", which you can find linked in earlier blog entries.
• We completed the chart reproduced in the earlier blog entry.
• I assigned chapters VIII and IX for homework for Tuesday.

Have a nice weekend!

Block 2 10/13 Homework

For homework please print and complete the chart in preparation for class on Monday. Have a nice weekend!

Advanced Placement Language and Composition                                Name

Douglass/Easton Argumentation in Fiction

 

 

Proslavery Argument from Aunt Phyllis’ Cabin. Be sure to include quotations and page numbers.	Corresponding Antislavery Argument from Douglass. Be sure to include key phrases in Narrative of the Life of a Slave.	What are the strategies (characterization, symbolism, theme, conflict etc..) for creating the argument?
1.
2.
3.
4.

 

10/13 and 10/14

Today in class:

• We read an excerpt from Aunt Phyllis' Cabin, an example of Anti-Tom literature from 1852. http://utc.iath.virginia.edu/proslav/prfimhea2t.html
• We discussed and articulated in our notebooks the proslavery arguments that Mary Easton makes in the reading.
• We began thinking about how Douglass counters the pro-slavery argument in his Narrative.