Taking a Look Back

Welcome back to student life.

 I trust you will find  this  useful as you review for your upcoming test of The Restoration and Eighteenth Century on Thursday the Tenth.

In Which We Sat On Desks

With half our number away for various reasons today, Lit class was rather small. But we accomplished a lot! Mrs. Loconte announced that the test for The Restoration and the 18th Century would be on Thursday, January 10th. Charlie Brown's father was a barber. That gives us, as some stated, "three days" to review. Since no one intends to work much during the holiday. Although that wouldn't be a bad idea...

We went on to review "To a Mouse", and made sure its purpose was clear. From there, we moved on to Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard, followed by William Blake's biography, and his Songs of Innocence and Songs of Experience. Bethany read for us the commentary on these works. We then started the homework, and class ended a few minutes later.

WHAT TO DO FOR HOMEWORK:

For those who were away:

• Read the Elegy (pp.433-436)
• Read William Blake's Biography (p. 442)
• Read Songs of Innocence, the Introduction and The Lamb (pp.443-444)
• Read Songs of Experience, the Introduction and The Tiger (p. 446)
• Read the commentary on The Tiger (p. 447)
• Hand in your essays/satires/mock epics

For all:

• Answer the Study and Discussion Questions for the Elegy (p. 437, all)
• Read The Eighteenth Century and The Restoration and the Eighteenth Century (pp. 449-451), no questions for this section
• Brush up on the 18th Century in preparation for the test

The breakdown for the test is as follows:

• Short answer paragraph responses (general ideas, themes)
• 6 paragraphs, 5 marks each (total of 30 marks)
•  Quotes (who is the author and what's the significance)
• 10 quotes, 2 marks each (total of 20 marks)
• History and Literature
• Total of 15 marks

That's a grand total of 65 marks. There is no essay portion on this test.



Enjoy the holidays, ho ho ho!

Spiderman

Today Mrs. Loconte was sadly missing so we had a sub whose name escapes me at this moment, not because he was not memorable, but because I don’t believe that he ever actually told us his name. With our work laid out neatly for us on the board, we began by reading Preface to Shakespeare. We were particularly intrigued by Johnson’s comment that “Shakespeare has no heroes.” We all proceeded to agree with this statement and decided that almost all of Shakespeare’s protagonists have flaws. The sub then pointed out that he preferred heroes with flaws than heroes without. He used the example of DC comic book characters begin too good and perfect whereas the Marvel superheroes have flaws that make them much more relatable. With the subject of Marvel brought up, I asked the sub why Spiderman was not included in the Avengers (something I have been wondering for quite some time). We then had an interesting conversation about who owns the rights to make Marvel movies and we concluded that we should all get together and see the 1994 version of the Fantastic Four even though we’d have to download it illegally. After we satisfied our superhero curiosity we proceeded by finishing the questions to accompany the Preface. Next we read To a Mouse in a variety of fascinating accents ranging from, Scottish, to Scottish-ish, to pirate, to utter nonsense. It was all quite enjoyable. The first word spoken on the moon was Okay. Nice choice. We then attempted the questions and began a conversation about how utterly disturbing short stories are. After this, the AP-Calc joined us and we went over our Greek alphabet in the dying minutes of class. We ended early at three to join the rest of the school in a farewell assembly for Rob (in which we unfortunately never did get to sing our Sound of Music song). If you read this whole post, I congratulate you. And if you didn’t, don’t worry about it, I understand because let’s be honest, if I just saw this big chunk of words, I probably wouldn’t either.

Homework:

·        You guessed it, PROJECT due Tuesday!

·        And possibly go over To a Mouse since the accents may have distracted us from the meaning…just a little.

Cards, Cut Hair, and a Battle of the Sexes...Very Epic

Today we started out by planning our trip to the graveyard.  We will hopefully go tomorrow if rides can be arranged.  Otherwise it will be postponed to Monday.  If you were to spell out numbers, you would have to go until one thousand until you would find the letter "A".  After that we read and discussed the Rape of the Lock.  It was incredibly epic for something so trite.  Next we looked at some epigrams by Pope and picked out our favourites, which was difficult because they were all really good.  We finished by reading the intro to the Age of Johnson.
Homework:
- Read Wit and Nature (p. 414-415)
- Read Samuel Johnson's Bio (p. 418)
- Read the intro to Johnson's Dictionary and a few of the entries (p.420)

Read Canto 3!

Don't do the questions!

Thursday's Special: Extra plump kids. Roast them, bake them, boil them just the way you like

I apologize for the late blog, hopefully everyone did their homework and hopefully everyone who did so got their UBC applications in on time. So on Thursday, just for recaps, we read on A Modest Proposal Jonathan Swift. It was definitely one of those more memorable pieces that we have read, in my opinion. It was absurd, but a very well written poem with convincing arguments as to why selling your children for food would be a good thing. We talked about our thoughts on the poem and our first impressions. In the beginning of the class we had a short recap on The Restoration Age, we talked about the Age that we are in right now and many various things. We also got our essays back and I do believe that everyone left class kind of in a more unended (made that word up hehe) way. Like the discussion on A Modest Proposal wasn't completely concluded and their was so much more we could say. But regardless of that it was a Thursday and we were all anxious to get home and wait for the weekend to come. Did you know that the largest Christmas present was the Statue of Liberty given by the French to the US in 1886

Homework:
Answer Questions on A Modest Proposal pg 388 1-4
Read Alexander Pope's Bio pg 400
Read the introduction of The Rape of the Lock pg 401

Sojourners in A Land of Books and Couches

Having been evicted from Mrs. Loconte's room due to light installation, our class today was held in the library. This new environment proved to be ironically distracting, as Mrs. Loconte pointed out.  I blame the couches.  We began with a discussion on the marking scheme for our most recent writing assignment, which will take the form of either an expository essay, a persuasive essay, a satire, or an epic poem.  Essays will be marked using the typical 6 point scale; the satire will be graded on content and creativity, and should be between 500-750 words; the epic poem should contain all the heroic elements, be presented in a mocking tone, and be 50-80 lines long. The human heart creates enough pressure when it pumps out to the body to squirt blood 30 feet. After this lengthy, winding discussion with a few interruptions and digressions, we quickly went through the homework on Gulliver's Travels. Pretty light on the homework front today - come to next class with your ideas for our lit shirts and research the rules for the game "ombre".