Senior Seminar: Who Am I? (at the Moment)

WHO AM I? (at the MOMENT)

Day ONE This week we're just getting started.  Since the whole semester is going to be about your individual heroic journey through high school, we're going to begin by taking a look at where you are at right now.

You'll complete a "Who Am I? (at the Moment)"  graphic organizer with sketchnotes to take a personal inventory.

Then represent those sketchnotes in LEGO bricks.

That's day one.

Day TWO, we establish the ways in which we will document our learning.

We'll set up folders on Google Drive.  Share those folders with me -- make sure I'm an editor -- and that's where you'll turn in work for the course.

Then we'll set up our class blogs on Blogger.  (You'll also be creating a personal branded blog as part of this course.  More on that later.)  This is another way for us to document and share our thinking and learning this semester.

Finally, we'll use FlipGrid for the first time.  This is a video tool used to conduct discussions, document learning, and interact with other people in the class.   We'll finish the class by embedding our 1st FlipGrid videos on our blogs.


Day THREE will be quite a bit of watching, listening and responding.  More on that come Friday

AP Lit: Hamlet Begins

This week we begin our work with Hamlet.  I'm currently trying out my iPad to type this so apologies for wonky formatting.  I bought a keyboard case for it but it is sorely lacking.

Monday we explored some of Shakespeare's thematic ideas that emerge in Hamlet: trust, knowledge, discomfort, awareness, observation, power, control. Of course these are just ideas and topics, not themes unto themselves -- what Hamlet forces us to consider, those will be the true themes of the play.

I didn't take any pics of our staring at one another, but that's a great deal of what we did.  And then  discussed how we felt, what we experienced; we also did an exercise in observation.

And just barely started the play.

Wednesday, we dig further into the play.  We will read a great deal of the text in class and do some close readings.

Friday, you will present your True Grit as poetry presentations and explore various productions of Hamlet.

Show Your Thinking.

Read: Hamlet Act I.  Due Friday.

Blog: Analytical and Design.  Potent Quotable.  Choose a line from the act I you believe captures the essential TONE of the play so far.  The attitude Shakespeare as author, creator, intent driven artist is bringing to the words of the play.  Playful? Pedantic? Satiric? Doleful?

Then take that one line and illustrate with either an original photograph of your own or an image from Unsplash.com.  Use fonts and your design skills to create a visual.  Post it along with a written or recorded explanation of your intentions behind your design.  Posting your intentions is necessary to meeting the standards for media and reading.

Blog:  Critical Creativity.  Color Palette.  Use ColourLovers.com to create a three to five color color palette for Hamlet Act I. Give each color a unique name that reveals your understanding of the characters thus far.  Explain your intentions to meet the reading standard.

Independent Book Project: design a solution to a problem posed by your free choice work and present that prototype next Tuesday.  Be certain to justify your prototype intentions based on the text evidence you uncover.  Empathize with your user, consider what truly meets the needs and how you know.  Present to class next Tuesday.

True Grit as Poetry.  Make the case that True Grit follows the structure, form, qualities of an epic, ballad, or sonnet.  Design a visually effective presentation to make your case.  Think about the aesthetic qualities of those poetic forms, consider the devices that best define them, consider tone, subject matter, associated with each.  This should be a challenging question to answers, case to make.

Flipgrid in Eng 9

English 9: This Week. One Goal. Take Your Work to the Next Level.

This week we start experimenting with FlipGrid.  Take a look



Following these experiments, each day will be 100% about this little sketchnote.

Make sure everything is your Google Drive English 9 IN folder.
Make sure you have named each document.
Make sure you submitted evidence.

Think about tools you can use to PROVE YOUR INTENTIONS with your Tiny House.
You could take us through a video walk through using YouTube.
You can mark up photos using Pages or Google Drawing or Preview.
You can create interactive images with ThingLink.

Lots of tools.

Also Roots 8 (6, 7, 8) on Thursday/Friday!

Eng 9: Presenting Tiny Houses & Stations in Transition

This week we continue sharing our Of Mice & Tiny Houses design challenges.  Remember to check out the rubric available here and to use the empathy map and intention map graphic organizers in your Google Drive English 9 OUT folders.

We will be using stations to help our transition from Of Mice & Men into our Marketing with Empathy unit that will result in us taking over WickedFocus.com from last year's classes.

Stations this week will include.

Jenga Your Roots.  Create Jenga constructs to represent Roots 7 terms.  Post images in your Google Drive folder.  Prepare for a quiz next week.

Frankenword.  Design new words using your Roots 6 & 7 terms.  Put them to work in sentences that relate to the bigger messages and themes from Of Mice & Men.

Theme.  Complete a Notice/Wish/Wonder over this video on Theme.

No Red Ink: Commonly Confused Words II.   Complete the diagnostic on No Red Ink and the practice, if you so choose, to prepare for a quiz next week.

Designing & Writing:  Several folks still need to complete their narrative writings and their tiny house designs.  There will be some time to do that at one of the stations.

Potent Quotables:  At the Potent Quotables station, you will be learning how to combine words from a text -- in this case Of Mice & Men -- and images from a source -- in this case, Unsplash.com -- to create a visual worth of sharing on Facebook, Tumblr, Twitter, Snapchat, Instagram, Pinterest and beyond.  That visual will speak to one of the THEMES evident in Of Mice & Men.  You will need to explain your thinking and intentions as this will end up being a reading assessment for the quarter.

Here are some examples from the first sessions of Potent Quotables.

SHOW YOUR WORK.

OF MICE AND TINY HOUSES.
All work due ASAP.
Documentation (any photos, videos, notes, graphic organizers, etc.) must be in your Google Drive Eng 9 IN folder.

NARRATIVE WRITING 2.  Tell a story about the lesson you learned from the Cardboard Challenge.  Use powerful imagery and meaningful details to deliver a well organized story.
Revisions and Drafts due ASAP.
Must be in your Google Drive Eng 9 IN folder.

ROOTS QUIZZES.
NO RED INK MUGS Quizzes.
Coming up next week.
Retakes require evidence of practice.

AP Lit: Epic.

This week we dove into epics . . . and talked about all sorts of other stuff too including school climate, the WWE, dress codes and more.

I'm gonna leave this right here for you . . .

Tuesday's class was a great day of unexpected conversation about school climate and culture, making change happen, empathy between teacher and student, and seemed to not have much to do with AP Lit except for the fact that it most certainly did.  How might we use that conversation to inform our design challenge regarding poetry as a vehicle for solving problems on our campus?

Thursday we worked with the 1st Canto of The Inferno and all too briefly with the 1st book of Paradise Lost.  We will be returning to these texts regularly throughout the year because so much of what we read references these two works.  In other words, we ain't done wid 'em yet.

Here are some pics of our Literary 3x3 work.  We started with laying out our 3x3s for Inferno and then remixing and mashing them up into a united single 3x3 based on the collective ideas and language present.

From there I asked you to write two thesis statements based on that work -- one analytical in nature, one synthesis in nature.  We didn't get a chance to workshop those as a class so we will revisit them on Monday.  

Then we shared our 3x3s of Paradise Lost Book 1.

This week I didn't get this blog updated on time, so if you need the weekend to get your blog posts up, that's okay.  (I did tell you on Tuesday what the assignments were in class ANNNNNNND it's okay if you don't have it done until Monday.)

SHOW YOUR WORK.

WRITE.  1st Submission Draft.  Synthesis Essay #2.

DUE. Monday 12.12.16

BLOG.

CREATIVE BLOG POST.  Write the 1st 20 lines of a Mock Epic. Use the language and form and qualities of epic poetry to start an epic about one of the most mundane tasks in your life.

READ. How to Read Lit Like a Prof.  "One Story."

ANALYTICAL & DESIGN BLOG POST.   Unpack the "One Story" chapter in Foster by asking what are the implications for this idea of "One Story" on our poetry as school solution design challenge.

DUE. Monday 12.12.16

AP Lit: Bieber to Barbara Allen -- Exploring the Ballad

We opened today with a listen to the Beeb's masterpiece,  "Sorry."

We took a look at the lyrics as we listened to this cover  by Ben Rector.

This led to a discussion of tone, of voicing, of speaker, of aesthetics and presentation and its influence upon interpretation.  Rector's rendition lends an authenticity we felt missing from the original -- which we also discovered was written by The Beebs and a team of hundreds (or maybe like three or four other people.)

From here we shifted about a decade back to The Avett Brothers "Ballad of Love and Hate."

We started making a few connections here, seeing a couple of possible patterns, but it really didn't kick in until we dove a generation or two back.

We looked at Dylan's "A Hard Rain's A-Gonna Fall"

And we discovered it's an emotional song for many of us.  We also discovered a great deal interesting about its structure and form, about Dylan's use of internal rhyme and alliteration, and about the effect of the song being in two voices -- the father and the son.   We dove briefly into the biblical allusions evident in the text and then turned our attention to a female balladeer.

Dolly Parton has become synonymous with 1980s country-pop and become more known for her personal style  than anything else.  But here's the thing: for people in the know?  Dolly Parton is one of the greatest songwriters that has ever lived.  Period.   "Jolene" is one of her many masterpieces.  We had a brief discussion of this song and made some interesting points about whether or not Jolene actually exists or is just the manifestation of the speaker's insecurity.  I'm looking forward to returning to this song when we are talking about different lens through which to read and view literature -- a feminist lens on the poem I think could reveal some new insights.

We ran short on time though we did talk even more more about what we could uncover about the ballad form from these selections.  We noted that they tell stories, that they are often quite straight forward even if they make use of figurative language and metaphor, that there is often a dialogue or two characters at the very least.  The stories are usually sad and involve love or romance of some sort.

Before we ended the class we took a look at a few of the traditional ballads of Great Britain's past.

Barbara Allen was the first.  

Barbara Allen

Related Poem Content Details

BY ANONYMOUS

In Scarlet town, where I was born, 

   There was a fair maid dwellin’, 

Made every youth cry Well-a-way! 

   Her name was Barbara Allen. 

All in the merry month of May, 

   When green buds they were swellin’, 

Young Jemmy Grove on his death-bed lay, 

   For love of Barbara Allen. 

He sent his man in to her then, 

   To the town where she was dwellin’; 

“O haste and come to my master dear, 

   If your name be Barbara Allen.” 

So slowly, slowly rase she up, 

   And slowly she came nigh him, 

And when she drew the curtain by— 

   “Young man, I think you’re dyin’.” 

“O it’s I am sick and very very sick, 

   And it’s all for Barbara Allen.”— 

O the better for me ye’se never be, 

   Tho’ your heart’s blood were a-spillin’! 

“O dinna ye mind, young man,” says she, 

   “When the red wine ye were fillin’, 

That ye made the healths go round and round, 

   And slighted Barbara Allen?” 

He turned his face unto the wall, 

   And death was with him dealin’: 

“Adieu, adieu, my dear friends all, 

   And be kind to Barbara Allen!” 

As she was walking o’er the fields, 

   She heard the dead-bell knellin’; 

And every jow the dead-bell gave 

   Cried “Woe to Barbara Allen.” 

“O mother, mother, make my bed, 

   O make it saft and narrow: 

My love has died for me today, 

   I’ll die for him tomorrow.” 

“Farewell,” she said, “ye virgins all, 

   And shun the fault I fell in: 

Henceforth take warning by the fall 

   Of cruel Barbara Allen.” 

And "Lord Randall" the second.

We will be looking at more ballads in the week to come, but first we must take a look at epics and get our 2nd synthesis essays in good order.

SHOW YOUR WORK.

This weekend read these openings of ancient, classical,  medieval and English Renaissance epics.

READ the 1st 20 lines of The Odyssey by Homer.

READ  the 1st 20 lines of Beowulf, the ancient poem of northern European origins.

Those two above are to give you some context for the epic form in its origins.

READ, NOTE & CREATE. For the next two, take the time to annotate, take notes, and/or sketchnote.  Bring LITERARY  3x3s of these selections by Dante and Milton to class on Tuesday, 12.6.16

READ.  the 1st Canto I of Dante's Inferno, a medieval story of descending into the underworld.

And finally READ.  Book 1 of Milton's Paradise Lost, the opening scenes depicting the beginning of the world according to Milton's take on Christian dogma.

UPDATE the Q2 BLOG TRACKER with your best evidence from November, as well as anything current.

WRITE to TURN IT.  Be prepared with 1st SUBMISSION DRAFT of your 2nd Synthesis Essay for THURSDAY'S class, 12.8.16. I want these back to you with plenty of time BEFORE the break.