What We've Learned So Far

What we’ve focused on so far:

• Reading Pride and Prejudice: learning plot, characters, satire vs. sarcasm, long sentences, bad dad, first impressions, how characters are introduced through narrator, gossip, action, dialogue and how each can sway the reader differently. How authors control our perceptions of different characters strategically, for a bigger purpose, of a designed pre-planned reading experience. When a reader has autonomy to decide.
• Summer Reading Their Eyes were Watching God: How Hurston introduces characters through gossip
• Annotation: why it’s important, how to do it effectively.
• Grading Rubrics that describe A vs. B writing: UC Davis, Princeton, Harvard, English IV
• Sample student essays: reading, ranking, evaluating. Determining the most important qualities of stand-out essays. Thesis? Catchy title or opening? Smooth, easy-to-follow writing? Ideas that one can grasp? Sticking to the topic without digression? Well-analyzed quotes that fit the topic?
• Introduction, Title, Thesis Statement, Topic Sentence
• Blogs for everyone
• Turnitin.com: how to use it, what it’s for besides just preventing plagiarism
• The Writing Process, from brainstorming to drafting, to revision
• Narrowing down a topic and having something to say: the first third of a college writing assignment is figuring out what to say, how to narrow the focus, how to logically deduce something based on re-reading the text.
• Writing a college-level essay. Some writing in class, most out of class on a weekend for uploading to Turnitin.com.
• A few reading quizzes.
• Classroom discussion of best essays, how characters get introduced in novels, and college admissions essays.
• Daily in-class writing in journals: less pressure, frequent writing
• Near-daily at-home writing on blogs: less pressure, frequent writing, critical thinking and analysis, sharing your writing with the world and your classmates (through the SmartBoard)
• Inititial drafts and discussions about college admissions essays: small incident, five senses, catchy opening, reveals who you are, clear writing
• Watching the fish swim randomly on the blog on the SmartBoard

What we will work on next:
• Learning from the feedback on your first essay. Blogging on your goals for your writing, including syntax and grammar errors, sentence fluidity, structure, paragraph organization, communication with the reader, development of ideas, sticking with one topic, narrowing your focus, and all the other realizations about how to improve writing.
• Much clearer diction and sentence level writing.
• Much clearer communication of (and then development of) central idea
• Practice with adverbs, semicolons, comma splices, fragments, commas, MLA format, etc.
• Frequent practice and quizzing on basic surface level rules
• Daily practice in forming an interesting claim (using poetry, fiction, college essays, quotes, etc.)
• Annotation of poetry, reading poetry, picking one line or word from a poem, forming a thesis about a poem, selecting quotes to support an argument
• Critical thinking, thinking aloud, thinking on paper, pushing your ideas, sharing your ideas, going out on a limb,
• Finish Jane Austen and discuss the book as a whole
• Test on Jane Austen
• DW Harding on comedy vs. nightmare
• Daily journal writing, daily blogging, structured paragraph writing, and frequent 3-5 page college essays
• Carol Jago’s new textbook: on literature, lit devices, composing essays, close reading, reading poetry, fiction, and drama
• Hamlet and Shakespeare: getting the plot, learning the language, an essay on how different characters are given different rhythms of language, different kinds of words, and why Shakespeare does that
• Acting out a scene of Hamlet for the class, for the camera, for learning
• Five different film versions of one scene of Hamlet