Hey class, remember back in March when we were going to class every day? Remember the first VERY LONG POST I wrote you after school became what it is now? Like Einstein said, time is relative, and it has certainly been passing in a strange way this semester. I feel like I have known you for several lifetimes instead of five months. Somehow everything is moving faster than it ever has and slower than it ever has, simultaneously. What I'm saying is, summer is almost here. You've finished all your assignments, and even your late work will be done by the end of today. We have one more week together for enrichment, and then you'll be out on your own, transformed into juniors, starting on the second half of your high school lives. Every time summer rolls around, every time I clean up stray papers from my classroom and verify grades for the last time, I always sing the "Summertime" song to myself: "Summertime and the living is easy," like Etta James says. This week, your enrichment activities were to map out your own specific goals and make them SMART. For our last week of school, we're going to talk about English class specific summer goals to help you succeed in the rest of your high school language endeavors. There are 3 main areas for you to focus on: 1. Summer Reading 2. Annotation 3. Sentence Structure Summer reading is a reality of every grade-level transition at Bellaire. As for the annotations and the sentence structure, we (the English 2 teachers) asked the English 3 teachers what skills you guys would need to succeed in English 3 next year. They said if you had an understanding of annotating and sentence construction, you would be set up for success. Summer ReadingFor summer reading, you can choose to read any one of the following three books: The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time by Mark Haddon, The Book Thief by Marcus Zusak, and Sunrise over Fallujah by Walter Dean Myers. These books are for Academic English 3 and College Prep English 3. If any students are planning on signing up for AP English Lang, the books are different. If you are interested in AP English next year, please email or Remind me to set up a TEAMS meeting, and I'll tell you about the summer requirements for AP. If you have any questions about the summer reading, I will post a couple of English 3 teacher email addresses in Google Classroom for you to contact. If you want to read a murder mystery with strong and innovative point of view, try out The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time. I read it in college and loved it. The video above is a promotional trailer for a stage production of the book. If you enjoyed reading Night in class, you will probably love The Book Thief. Marcus Zusak is one of the most compelling authors I've read recently. Highly recommended. Many of you are already familiar with Walter Dean Myers' work: he wrote Monster and Bad Boy. Sunrise over Fallujah takes place post 9/11 during the war with Iraq. I don't think it's possible to choose a bad book from this list. I will say, if it were me, I would choose The Book Thief: such a beautiful book. Happy reading!! AnnotationAnnotating a text means writing on it and engaging with it. If you are in a position to buy your own copy of your summer reading book, annotating that book is a really good place to start because you will have some activities and assignments associated with your book when you return to school in the fall. This video from Lisa's Study Guides gives a lot of specific strategies for annotating. I love looking at all the examples of annotating and notetaking on Pinterest and Instagram. Some students out there have elevated these skills to an art form. Your annotating doesn't have to be as codified, neat, or artistic as these annotation super-stars to work. Any form of annotating, no matter how messy, can help you engage with and deepen your understanding of any text you are reading. Sentence StructureYour English 3 teachers also recommended that you brush up on the different types of sentence structure. Sentence structure and grammar in general is a different kind of skill from literary analysis. In my experience, some students love it, some students hate it, and very often the students who loved literature hate grammar and vice versa. But studying sentence structure can have big, big payoffs for you, the kind that last your whole life. Understanding the way language works can help you create more sophisticated sentences of your own and communicate with the world more effectively. It can also give you the basic framework of understanding you need to make learning the structure of a second, third, or fourth language easier. Khan Academy has a free and easily understandable learning track for syntax, which is just another word for sentence structure. Here is the link. Well, guys, that's a wrap, LAST POST-wise. Stay safe, stay positive, stay healthy, stay curious. It's been my privilege to teach you this semester. Happy summering!
Well class, I have some good news for you: the deadline for grades to be submitted has been moved up, so the imagery DJ is actually your last DJ! We teachers learned that the last day for new assignments is Monday, May 18. The last day for you to turn in late work to me is Wednesday, May 20: basically a week from today. (Remember, if you pass my class this year you will never have to take the English 2 STAAR.) At the end of the day, the universe has decided that you don't need to submit a dialectical journal analyzing the theme of your free choice novels. I think they call this a "reprieve." But no one's stopping me from talking about theme... As D4Darious points out, theme is a complete idea, not just a word. For example, the idea "isolation" is not a theme of these coronavirus times. It's just a word, a subject. Putting the subject into a sentence makes it into a theme. One theme that is true for my corona days is this: "Isolation is an opportunity to reflect." What are some of the themes of your novel? Do you agree with them? What are some of themes of your novel experiences in reaction to a novel coronavirus? Think more about my theme: "Isolation is an opportunity to reflect." What do you want out of life? What do you value the most? What do you enjoy the most? What parts of yourself do you want to develop? How do you want to grow? Whatever your answers are to those questions, goal setting can help you figure out ways to accomplish your dreams. Goal setting is a strategy to help you. Because if you don't know where you're going, how will you know if you get there? If you don't have a destination, you can't really ever hope to arrive at the end. Take a few minutes this week to write about what you want out of life. You can use the time you would have dedicated to writing your last dialectical journal. Some of you have already mentioned your big goals in your structured journals: some students plan to hone their guitar skills, some plan to work to become better sports players, some students are learning about photography, cooking, sewing, gardening. After you have your big goal or goals, use the strategies in the video to cut your big goal into smaller goals. Make them Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant, and Time-bound. Make your goals SMART. Then put those goals on a calendar. Like it says in the goal setting video, sharing your goals with others makes it more likely they will get accomplished. So I'm going to share my summer goals with you:
1. Read Harry Potter in French and listen to the audio book. 2. Plot my next writing project, a young adult fantasy novel. 3. Practice yoga four times a week. 4. Complete my last grad school residency and GRADUATE. 5. Swim in the ocean. 6. Teach five hours of yoga classes. If you'd like to share your goals, I invite you to do so either in your last structured journal of the year, or in a TEAMS meeting. Hello class! Only two more DJ's left: imagery and theme. Wednesday, May 14th, you will be analyzing an example of imagery in your free choice novels. Just as a reminder, imagery in literature is language that engages a reader by appealing to one or more of the five senses: sight, sound, smell, taste, and/or touch. In the above photo, for example you can see the green colors of the water and the grass. But the image also suggests other senses. A writer who wanted to appeal to the senses and bring the scene alive could discuss the sound of the waterfall, the smell of wet grass crushed under the feet of a character, the cold spray from the water on a character's face, and even the mineral taste of the droplets. Here is a very short video that reviews imagery a little further: With MRI imaging, scientists have learned that the same processes in the brain are activated with mental images formed in a reader's mind from skillfully crafted imagery descriptions that we use to perceive the actual world around us. This makes imagery in literature one of the most powerful tools authors have to help readers experience the worlds they create. It's the writer's job to choose the most relevant, powerful details to share with their readers. This week, as you read your novel and pay attention to the five senses, I encourage you to pay attention to your own senses as you experience your world. Engaging your five senses with your surrounding environment is a classic mindfulness technique that has been known to alleviate anxiety by grounding a person in the present moment. When you are engaging fully with the present, it's harder to worry about the past or fret about the future. As a kind of extra activity, I invite you to try going (safely) for a mindfulness walk. You can go on your own and try to engage all five of your senses as you walk. I invite you to take a photo on your walk and write about your experience for your Structured Journal of the week. Here is a 4 minute video by Head Space discussing the why and how of a mindfulness walk. The following video definitely engages all five senses. We'll discuss how in our first TEAMS meeting of the week. Did you know the word conflict comes from the Latin words "struck together?" This image of being struck together reminds of a person trying to build a campfire in a wilderness with flint and steel. Like this guy: Basically, without friction, there is no fire. And without conflict, there is no story. Now that we are in the third fifth of your free choice novels, there should be multiple strands of conflict revealed. You will be analyzing one of them. You will locate a place in the text where the author is developing conflict. You will also need to identify what kind of conflict you've found. Probably, your conflict will be one of these four most common types:
Let's look at examples of these four types of conflict using music videos from the 90's. (Either the 90's were a particularly conflicted decade, or I just remember it like that because those were the years I was in middle school.) In our Curriculum TEAMS meeting of next week, we'll analyze one of these videos together. 1. Character versus CharacterBrandy versus Monica. 2. Character versus SocietyGwen Stephani versus the Patriarchy. 3. Character versus SelfJohn Michael Stipe versus his own Faith. 4. Character versus NatureFran Healy versus the Rain (and the Scottish Highlands). And there you have it, the 4 most common types of conflict. Less common (and not from the 90's) are the following two types of conflict: Character versus Supernatural (perhaps relevant for those of you reading vampire or fantasy stories) and Character versus Technology. Character versus SupernaturalMichael Jackson versus the Undead. Further back to 80's. Have you guys ever seen this before? The TikTok aficionados out there have something to learn from Michael's dance moves, as do we all. Watching this video is a cultural education in itself. Character versus TechnologyJanelle Monae versus the Androids. And now we're back in the 2000's. Janelle Monae: ALSO A GREAT DANCER, RIGHT? So much cultural commentary in this video, too. Hello again, students! I hope that you've been able to hit a kind of daily rhythm with your school week. Now that our lives aren't governed by the bells of Bellaire, we all have more freedom, which I hope you are enjoying, but a general routine during the day can be comforting and helpful. I like a lot of what this blog post has to say about school at home: create a routine, not a schedule; don't try to do every subject every day; and most of all follow your own inclinations. For me, a kind of routine has been shaping up during the school week, and even the weekends. Thanks to the mischief canine twins, Birdie and Bracken, I'm up at 7:00 every morning. That's 7 AM for those of you out there who seem to have turned into spontaneous night creatures now that you don't have physical school to tether you to daylight. In the time between making coffee and teaching, I work on my own schoolwork. Then teaching time, and in the afternoons I do my second round of homework: yoga homework for the yoga teacher training I started after I took a Character Strength Survey. Turns out my number one character strength is "Love of Learning." So, might as well learn some more stuff with my extra time. So why think so much about time? And space? Because next up, we're analyzing setting in your free choice novels. Thinking about how time and space affects us is a bridge to thinking about how time and space affects the character development or plot of your free choice novels. No story takes place in a vacuum, and the setting is vital for all stories. For example, in We Were Liars, the majority of the action takes place on a small island off the coast of Massachusetts in the summer. An island is a very particular world with very real boundaries. That means there's nowhere to run, and the setting becomes instrumental in bringing the main character to face a buried truth of her past. As you look for quotes to use for setting dialectical journals, keep the following tip from this website in mind: Examine the details. Pay close attention to detailed descriptions of the setting, such as weather, the natural surroundings or the inside of a house or room. These details provide clues as to the emotional condition of the characters. I'll end this post with a video of a beautiful setting, one we would have visited together through Othello had school not been cancelled. During the first "essential" TEAMS meeting of next week, April 26th or 27th, we'll look at this video together and brainstorm some ways that this particular setting could affect plot and character. Hello, class! I have said this several times already in TEAMS meetings, but just in case you haven't heard it yet: I am REALLY enjoying reading your structured journals! We should have done this a long time ago. I'm learning about all kinds of different things through your interests: different musicians and types of anime. It's great stuff! Keep it up. I thought about your journals when I saw this article in the New York Times: "Why You Should Start a Coronavirus Diary." We're one step ahead of course, but I still found the article to be really interesting, especially the section "Know Your Story Has Value." Just in case you need to hear this: it's true. Your story and your thoughts have value. So do your images. They help illustrate your point-of-view. Check out this other story in the New York Times to see what I mean. On Wednesday April 22, your first Round Two Free Choice Dialectical Journal (DJ for short) is due. You'll be analyzing characterization. Just as a review, remember that authors use a variety of ways to craft believable characters. Sometimes, authors directly tell us who the characters are by using descriptive adjectives. For example, in We Were Liars, a book by E. Lockhard that I just finished reading with my book club, the main character Cady says, "I used to be strong, but now I'm weak." These descriptions are examples of direct characterization. Authors also use indirect characterization by revealing a character to the reader through that character's words, thoughts, dialogue, actions, and physical description. For this assignment, please focus on an example of indirect characterization. We'll be talking some more about characterization during our first TEAMS meeting of next week. About the TEAMS meeting: I HAVE AN ANNOUNCEMENT. Which will also be explained on your agenda for next week. The first TEAMS meeting will be "required:" I'll have essential information (like characterization info) to help you succeed on your free choice DJs. The second TEAMS meeting of the week (Thursday or Friday depending on your class) will be an optional question and answer session, only necessary for students who need some extra guidance. Thank you for reading to the end of the post. Your reward for sticking with me is the following very strange and joyous hand-drawn animation of a Japanese lady dancing all over town. Hello, students! As promised, this blog post is an example text of what I expect from your structured journals. Remember, the two requirements are 1) 250 words and 2) an image that relates to your words in some way. You have freedom when it comes to the format: you can handwrite, type, or create blog posts. You also have freedom when it comes to subject matter: you can write about anything at all on your mind, as long as you remember that this particular journal is public, not private. You will have at least one reader (me). I will post my word counts after each section of text so that you can mark my progress. And now, let the structured journaling begin! I’ve been paying a lot of attention to plants these days, especially blooming ones. Since my husband and I have started planning our meals (more or less) weeks in advance, the only time I leave my apartment these days is to take the pups on walks. Bracken prefers short walks: go outside, get done what needs to get done, and he’s ready for a snuggle and a nap again. And maybe an afternoon snack. Birdie is an adventuress. She loves going further afield, smelling new smells, giving the squirrels a run for their money. Between you and me, I don’t think she’ll ever catch one, at least not unless she figures out a way to seriously improve her technique. She hunts squirrels and I hunt flowers. I don’t know the name of this purple flower, but it is familiar to me. It grew in the wild area beside the gray house I grew up in Mississippi. In the spring, I would pick handfuls of these. I only found one or two blossoms on my walk, but in my memory of my childhood home, we had fields. I remember them as blooming after the dogwood. First the dogwood tree bloomed, then the grape hyacinths, then these flowers. As a kid I always called them bluebells. But surely they are purple. Maybe lavender. (221 words) Today I noticed the lantana blooming. There is an order here, but I don't know how to calculate and quantify it. Maybe some mathematical equation of growing beauty, like the golden ratio. The tiny blossoms seem to reveal themselves in a pattern: first a ring of yellow and white blossoms pop out one by one, then an outer band of pink blossoms. Eventually all the middle buds will pop out into flowers. (72 words) And...that's it. I wrote a total 293 words. If you like, you can also write over the word limit. I hope I showed you that you can literally write about anything at all. If the idea of writing about ANYTHING gives you anxiety instead of a sense of freedom, here is a list of simple journal prompts you can use to jump start your writing,
Well, students, this week has been an adventure. For sure. One thing we now know: school will be out at least another month. Governor Greg Abbott has issued a state-wide mandate requiring schools to remain closed until at least May 4th. After that announcement, HISD announced that physical school will remain closed "until further notice." I want to thank all of you who made an effort (even if it wasn't completely successful) to engage and interact with our online TEAMS class meetings. I know it's weird, and I know it's a poor substitute for real school. Thank you guys for sticking with this whole experiment and investing in your learning. Your learning: let's take a minute to talk a little about what it will look like for the rest of the year. Since the STAAR has been cancelled, the only graduating requirement you need from our English 2 class is the credit for the course. In other words, a passing grade. As I've said a couple of times, we have two major objectives (generally speaking): reading and writing. I asked you guys to respond to a Google Form to give feedback about how our reading and writing will look for the last cycle, and the winners (in both classes) were another free-choice novel for reading, and structured journaling for writing. We're going to go with this, although I reserve the right to introduce short class readings. We will finish our dialectical journals for our 1st round of free choice novels on April 9th when your 9th and 10th dialectical journals will be due. After that, we will start a new free choice book. Maybe you are lucky enough to have access to a book that you would enjoy reading, but in case you don't, check out the resources in my previous blog post to help you find some free online books to browse. In addition to those sites and resources, we now have access to a National Emergency Library with even more titles available for free. In the first TEAMS meeting of next week, we'll discuss ways for you to find your next novel. If you're having a hard time finding a book you would enjoy after that, reach out on Remind to schedule a free choice book conference. As far as structured journaling goes, you will write 250 words with at least one image due every Friday starting April 17th. You can choose when you write the words: all at once, or you can just do one fifty word entry per day. You can hand-write and photograph your journal entries (as long as I can read them), you can type them up and turn them in as a Google Doc, or you can do a little learning adventure of your own and set up your own blog and publish your posts just like I'm publishing these posts. I'll be available to small group conference with any students who are interested in setting up their own blogs, but aren't sure how to do it. The platform I'm most familiar with is this one, Weebly. Creating a blog has more personal benefits beyond just increasing your literacy and exercising your writing abilities. A blog can become a part of a digital portfolio that you can continue adding to and crafting throughout the rest of your high school career and beyond. Universities all over the country are using digital portfolios as a part of their admissions requirements. Some of these universities are fancy, like Columbia and Harvard, and some are closer to home, like Texas A&M. More than ever, becoming adept at digital tools can only help you in your present and future success. Plus, it's a fun way to communicate with friends and family in our time of social distancing. We will be discussing our structured journals in our second TEAMS meeting of the week. Whatever your journal ends up looking like, it will be graded by word count and image. Do you have 250 words? 50 points towards your grade. Do you have a photo or image of some kind? 50 more points. My next blog post will be an example of a weekly journal submission: 250 random words and some images. As opposed to this post, which is however many not random words and some images. I'll leave with a short video of blooming flowers to remind you that we live in a beautiful world, and that this strange chapter in our lives won't last forever. Heeellllllo000ooo, students! The following is going to be a VERY LONG post. You may know by now, but just in case you don’t, school has been cancelled until at least April 10th. Also, Governor Greg Abbott has cancelled STAAR testing for all Texas students this year. If social media is right, parents everywhere are home from work and in the strange position of spearheading their kids’ learning for the first time. Next Tuesday, March 31st, online learning is going to be kicked off for real, but just in case any of your parents are struggling/pushing/encouraging you to do schoolwork right now, I wanted to give some guidance about ways you could spend your time learning meaningfully. Time: you have it, unexpectedly and in abundance. As a high schooler, I remember my time never being my own. It always belonged to my parents, or my teachers, or my job (as a server at a restaurant called Steak n’ Shake—I had to wear a red tie), or my volleyball team. Time is a resource, like money, and you are now richer, so much richer than I can ever remember being until I left my hometown to go to college. In this post, I want to give you some ideas of how you could spend your riches. Idea #1: Read whatever you want. If my mom hadn’t gotten me a library card, I would be a different person today. As a student, I remember feeling like I never had any choices, but my mom would always let me choose which books I wanted to check out in the library. In the summers, before I could drive, Mom would take my sister and me to the library once a week, and I’d check out so many books, maybe ten. I’d read them all by the public pool, or in my room, or in the neighborhood park, and check out another ten books, until the summer was over, and the stuff I read was decided once again by teachers. The following is a list of resources to help you find more freely chosen books you might like, which also happen to be free.
Unfortunately, the Houston Public Library announced it would close its doors to the public. If you already have a library card (or you know someone who does), you can still access all of their digital content for free. They have different digital platforms where you can check out ebooks, audiobooks, movies, shows, music, and graphic novels for free. Hoopla is my favorite. They also have study resources, like Brainfuse, which has a Writing Lab where you can get real feedback on your writing from real people, and Skill Surfer, which has all kinds of study help. Project Gutenberg has hundreds of free books, mostly older books. A good place to start is their list of the Top 100 most downloaded books. I personally recommend Dracula by Bram Stoker (did you know that the vampire myth originated to explain infectious disease?), The Count of Monte Cristo by Alexandre Dumas, Peter Pan by J. M. Barrie, and The Wonderful Wizard of Oz by L. Frank Baum. Wattpad is a platform where writers can immediately connect with readers by self-publishing. A student recommended it to me. A lot of the authors themselves are young people, so a lot of the writing is written with you in mind as the reader. If you don’t have a library card, you can check out digital books from Open Library. They have a newer, more up-to-date catalogue compared to Project Gutenberg. If graphic novels are your thing (and I know they are for at least some of you), Webtoons offers free ones. Unlike Wattpad, I actually use this platform to read all kinds of graphic novels. My absolute favorites are Annarasumanara, House of Stars, Muted, unOrdinary, and Lore Olympus. More graphic novels, of the manga persuasion. Also, lot’s of anime, including my favorite, Sailor Moon. Idea #2: Journal Guys, whether we like it or not, we are living through history. This virus is one of those things that we will remember, like Mr. George my old neighbor remembered the first sounds of the attack on Pearl Harbor, and like my math teacher Mr. Bush remembered his classmates crying in the hallways of his high school after the assassination of JFK. Those kinds of memories are valuable because they shed light on the experiences of real people living in real life during crazy times. Journaling is writing without boundaries, writing whatever you want to write about what is happening to you and your family, and how you are feeling in reaction to anything at all. You don’t have to journal about the coronavirus, in fact, you don’t have to journal at all. You are rich with time, and you get to decide what to spend it on. But I think journaling even a little bit every day is a valuable way to spend some of your time riches. For those of you who are all about the apps, there are some really great journaling ones out there. Second Everyday helps you create a documentary out of your days, almost like a moving photo essay. Day One Journal helps you create multimedia posts about your life, with photos and text. And DayGram has you journal only one line a day, for the busiest, no-nonsense journalers among us. For those of you who are more artistically bent, I encourage you to look into creating an art journal. Some summers ago, I took a class at the Glassell Art in art journaling, and I loved it. Idea #3: Learn about a random thing that interests you.
Now is the time to learn something just for you, something led by your own interests. Interested in art? Check out these free coloring pages from art museums around the world. Or go on a virtual tour of Paris museums. Interested in music? Watch one of the Met’s scheduled operas for free, listen to world-famous cello master Yo-Yo Ma serenade the world with songs of comfort, or hear this quarantined Italian opera singer share his music with his neighbors. Interested in animals? Check out one of the Cincinnati Zoo’s virtual safaris. Interested in yoga? The Down Dog app has made all of their content free for a limited time to help people exercise in a time of social distancing. Interested in something else? Take a free class with edX, Open Culture, or Coursera. You can find courses in almost anything, from world-renowned institutions like Harvard or MIT. A friend recommended this poetry course to me, which I just enrolled in. (Update: I dropped it. Just wasn't for me. I've decided to try to learn all the different kinds of trees in my neighborhood instead.) Idea #4: Ummm… Catch up with your free choice reading novels? If you’ve fallen behind in your free choice dialectical journals, you have a chance to catch up now. If a student has made a failing grade on their research project, I have excused that grade. The research project isn’t as well-suited to working at home as your free choice novel. If you are concerned about your grade, please make-up your free choice dialectical journals, and let me know so I can grade it with either the brand-new Remind technology, or with good old-fashioned email ([email protected]). I’m opening the Google Classroom windows (with no due dates for now) for all the rest of the dialectical journals in case any among you wish to work ahead and move on from your free choice novel to hopefully another, even freer choice novel. That was the last of the VERY LONG POST ideas. Please stay safe and healthy out there. If you need anything or have any questions about anything at all, email me or message me through Remind. You can also just comment on this post, although keep in mind that it would be a public comment that everyone will see. Sometime this week, you should get a phone call from the school or the district checking in on you and checking on your from-home technology accessibility and such. |
AuthorI'm a Houston high school teacher in the Spring of 2020. Welcome to my adapted, socially-distanced, quarantined English II classroom. Archives
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