The Reemerging of Strategies

In all classes, we continued forward with our vocab experts and then moved into individual hour's agendas. As hinted in the last blog, and which seventh hour found out to be a need today, know your modes of discourse so you have a greater understanding of passages and texts and, an added bonus, sound smarter too!

1 & 4: We finished our meetings today. Hooray! Hopefully, you have a better sense of what to do in the near future for your next assessments, the verbal partner RA and the cold read diagnostic. We will be working with noting what the author does in a passage, naming strategies correctly, and determining why the author has that strategy (hint - modes of discourse may be part of this).

3: You now have your essays back, have filled out your goal sheets, have formulated questions for our meetings, have started highlighting verbs and revising the passive, mundane ones with active, vibrant ones, and have spent quality time with your toolbox in preparation for stronger understanding of the passages. Phew! We are in process with our meetings, which will most likely take all of Thursday's class. With that in mind, take the class time, when you are not in a meeting, of course, and gain ethos on those modes of discourse and strategies.

7: Today was the reemerging of strategy finding, identifying by name, and analyzing with brief passages from The Outliers (look how we went from identifying the placement of repetition, for instance, to how it connected to the mode of discourse) and a longer passage from The Overachievers. As noted in class, the author introduces The Superstar to us in a plethora of ways to give us the ultimate picture of our dear Julie (at least she's dear now since EW began our class with a lack of affection for our picture perfect high school star). For homework, finish up your Julie reading and note the other techniques and strategies that the author continues to give us regarding the introduction of Julie. We'll meet our other 2 Overachievers during tomorrow's class. Great work today - how cool that we started off with talking about imagery and pathos, moves into tone shifts, and somehow managed to build to a crescendo of juxtaposition! Look what all of you are capable of doing!