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. Comments are closed.
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AuthorI'm a Houston high school teacher in the Spring of 2020. Welcome to my adapted, socially-distanced, quarantined English II classroom. Archives
May 2020
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