“Elephantine” Homework

Tonight you simply need to read George Orwell’s essay entitled “Shooting an Elephant” on page 979 of your book.  We’ll finish the interrupted reading on the first three paragraphs tomorrow as well as dive in to the rest of the essay and the prompts we’ll be working with for our argument paper.

Please don’t forget about the AP test post below.

Arrangement and Form

Your homework tonight consists of reading pages 13-26 in the Language of Composition and blogging the assignment on page 26.  This assignment and the reading are designed to introduce you to the concept of organization in your essays and expose you to the various types of organization commonly seen in writing.

• Remember that we have our first vocab test tomorrow.
• Kyle, sign up for a blog (you know which Kyle I’m talking about)!  Then email your blog address to mr.giddings@comcast.net or agiddings@fife.k12.wa.us.  You are the lone holdout.

Political Cartoons

For Tomorrow

Read pages 10-11 in our textbook and do the assignment on page 12 tonight.  Read the assignment carefully so that you are sure to do all that you need to—it’s a short text, but it is pretty packed. 

One great place to find many, many political cartoons for this assignment is slate.com.  There is a menu on the left that allows you to search cartoons by topic.  Remember to pick a cartoon that deals with an issue that you know something about.  That will help a great deal.    

Insert your cartoon into a blog post (unless you cut it out of the newspaper, though it would likely be online as well) and blog your analysis in response to the criteria in the book.  We’ll pull them up on the projector tomorrow to talk about them.  Be prepared to present your cartoon to the class. 

Notes

• As mentioned in class today, we are also taking our second timed write tomorrow.
• Vocab 1 quiz on Friday.

Paper Due Tomorrow!

Remember that your papers are due tomorrow (2/4/09).  As I said in class, you can get the MLA formatting instructions from the MLA at OWL link on the AP menu to the left.  I (and Ms. Robison who you’ll likely have for AP or College English next year) prefer that you NOT double-space your heading or include your name/page number in the heading.  Here are a couple of examples of what that would look like. 

To do page numbers, use the insert page number function in your word processor to put a page number in the upper right hand corner.  Then edit the header and type your last name followed by a space in front of the page number. 

If you are technically challenged and this poses a major cognitive meltdown, breathe.  The technical difficulties with the Activeboard in the lab today prevented me from demonstrating how to do this, so this format will not be required until the next paper.  Just try to get it as close as you can.

Also, please remember to bring your books tomorrow.  As noted in class on Monday, you should read pages 4-9 in your book by class tomorrow.

Weekend Notes

We will be in the study hall computer lab during the 2nd half of class on Monday and all of Tuesday.

So, Monday we have 45 minutes in the lab to write.  If you don’t have a USB drive, you can get your paper to the lab by pasting it into a post on your blog.

Tuesday is for peer review and revising.

We will spend the first half of Monday looking at some of the introductory material on rhetoric in our books so please bring your books to class on Monday.

Lastly, we’ll start our SAT vocabulary with Vocab 1 next week.  All the vocabulary is available here or via a link on the Class Info & Docs page.

Have a great weekend and happy thinking.

Metacognition Essay

Read over the assignment sheet and come to class with any questions (I’m planning a fair bit of time to explain this assignment further as metacognition will be a new concept for most of you).  

Also, please adjust the dates on the assignment sheet to the following:

Rough Draft: 2/3

Final: 2/4

Support Videos

Here is the link to the videos about how to use this site: http://edublogs.org/videos/.

Remember your homework tonight is to take another look at the Rodriguez piece in light of the SOAPStone tool to see if it helps you organize your observations from last night.  

We’ll discuss the Rodriguez piece more tomorrow and introduce your first paper (I know, I know).

 

Welcome to AP!

In this class, we will use Edublogs  to communicate assignments and to turn in much of our daily homework.  To set up your blog, follow these instructions.  Good luck and don’t forget to email me your new blog address and watch the training video.  

Other than setting up your blog and signing your syllabus, your homework tonight is to read and mark up the excerpt from Hunger of Memory by Richard Rodriguez.  Do your best and don’t worry about being wrong.  We’ll use piece in tomorrow’s activities.

Also, please remember your signed syllabus tomorrow (probably your easiest points all year).  I look forward to a good semester with you all.

To sum up:

• blog
• syllabus
• article

Class Pictures

Get your class pictures here.

Have a wonderful winter/spring semester!  I’ll miss you guys.  Sniff.

 

“You keep using that word.  I do not think it means what you think it means.”

AP Party

Hey AP 3rd Period People, remember if you want food at our party tomorrow, don’t forget to bring something.