Monday's Recap

As noted in the previous blog, you have the titles and links of the poems that will center our upcoming tone unit. Fifth hour will start tone on Tuesday, third hour on Thursday, and first hour (maybe?) on Thursday as well. As part of a college-level class, preparation and participation are key to comprehension and the application of skills to a plethora of texts and writings. Taking the time to preview work, clarify any vocabulary or allusions that may not be in your ethos, is the way to make our classes spend more time on the analysis (i.e. what you need for the test) rather than the paraphrase/summary portion (i.e. what you should be able to do on your own).

1: After vocab experts, we spent the class analyzing Gray's "The Favourite Cat" and Shelley's "Ozymandias," which coincidentally happen to share a similar purpose. While the diction may be different in each poem, both, as you concluded, acted as a warning to dissuade selfishness in society. (Of course, we did revise our class thesis statement for more "d" words as your class has now adopted the very solid, strong "d" sounds in verbs, adjectives, and purposes. Tomorrow will be "Ode on a Grecian Urn," one more opportunity to analyze diction and practice writing thesis statements.

3: After our vocab review, you had the chance to hear (and visualize) more about Keats and his life in preparation of our analysis of his letters to his beloved Fanny Brawne. At the end of the hour, you close read his first letter, which I will present to your class tomorrow as a model for how you will accomplish the same activity. Overall, it will involve multiple forms of diction, the adjectives to describe them, the evidence to support it, and the analysis of it.

5: We completed the vocab quiz for unit 15, which means any absentees will need to make up the assignment. For part two of class, we finished up the Keats' letters and ended with a summation of the diction and purposes that progress throughout the text and "chronicle" (thanks, CS for that purpose word) his life and affections.

To finish up our diction work, you have the following take home prompt to complete: Analyze how John Keats' diction reflects his mentality and purpose in his letters to Fanny Brawne. As clarified in class, you may handwrite or type the essay. A hard copy is due by 2:35 p.m. on Thursday. If you are absent for part of the day, you still need to turn this in by the deadline. If you are absent the entire day, you will need to e-mail, share, or send me a picture of your work and turn in the hard copy the next class session. I hope you enjoy writing about my Keatsy - just don't compare him to a girl waiting for a prom date (yes, real hook from several years ago).

To end the hour, we completed our second rhetorical toolbox quiz, which will be need to be made up by any absent students. See you tomorrow for all of our tone work - including the ever-fun, at least to me, tone mapping - with a reminder to preview some of the poems for tomorrow's class.