Wednesday, January 25, 2012
Lord of the Flies Chrestomathy Materials
This is the second of four chrestomathies each student will be required to complete this year in The World's Greatest English Class. The three links below are the guide for the materials that are needed for completion of the unit:
The first is the Table of Contents for the unit. This will be the first page of the completed chrestomathy. It shows what pages will be needed and in what order the materials will be presented.
The second is the Unit Specifics sheet for the unit. This sheet will not ultimately be included in the chrestomathy but is essential for knowing which options are available on each assignment. For example, included are the words available for the Word Quest and the topics available for all the types of writing in the unit, Narrative, Persuasive, and Response to Literature. The student will be referring to the sheet often.
The final sheet is the rubric that The World's Greatest English Teachers will be using when grading the chrestomathy. The student should print out a copy of this rubric so they will have a good idea how they will be graded, but it will not be included in the chrestomathy.
01/25/12 |
Posted by teacher | Category Lord of the Flies
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Tuesday, January 24, 2012
Download a copy of Lord of the Flies
While we're reading Lord of the Flies for the next few weeks, you may need to consult the book at home while you're doing your homework, such as completing the Literary Techniques or Foreshadowing worksheets, or searching for appropriate quotes for one of the three essays you must write.
For your convenience, here's a link to a
pdf version of the book. You can download it, then read it using any one of a large number of free reading tools.
Please delete it after we're done with the book.
If you need help, ask.
Take charge of your education!
01/24/12 |
Posted by teacher | Category General
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Tuesday, January 24, 2012
Prepare yourself for the California High School Exit Exam
In the World's Greatest English Classes, we'll be helping you prepare for the California High School Exit Exam in the coming weeks.
However, this test is so important to you and your future that you should work on your own to prepare for it. It's the responsible and adult thing to do. All the cool kids are doing it.
Here's a link to a
California Department of Education site which has the study materials you can print out and use to familiarize yourself with the style, format and content of the questions that will be asked on the actual test! It almost will be like having a copy of the test in advance! Almost.
01/24/12 |
Posted by teacher | Category General
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Sunday, January 15, 2012
Teacher Shows Class Binder of Praise Essays
Honors English Two teacher Patrick Hannigan today showed his class a binder of essays written by a previous class praising his fabulous stewardship of their educations.
The "show and tell" exercise was done on the second day of class.
This is categorically true.
01/15/12 |
Posted by teacher | Category General
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Monday, January 09, 2012
The Last Shot Chrestomathy Materials
This is the third of four chrestomathies each student in Mr. Campbell's First Period English Two class will be required to complete this year in The World's Greatest English Class. The three links below are the guide for the materials that are needed for completion of the unit:
The first is the Table of Contents for the unit. This will be the first page of the completed chrestomathy. It shows what pages will be needed and in what order the materials will be presented.
The second is the Unit Specifics sheet for the unit. This sheet will not ultimately be included in the chrestomathy but is essential for knowing which options are available on each assignment. For example, included are the words available for the Word Quest and the topics available for all the types of writing in the unit, Narrative, Persuasive, and Response to Literature. The student will be refering to the sheet often.
The final sheet is the rubric that The World's Greatest English Teachers will be using when grading the chrestomathy. The student should print out a copy of this rubric so they will have a good idea how they will be graded, but it will not be included in the chrestomathy.
01/09/12 |
Posted by teacher | Category The Last Shot
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Thursday, January 05, 2012
Teachers Named "World's Greatest Teachers of the Year"
An independent educational website has, for the fifth time, named James Logan Language Arts Teachers Tim Campbell and Patrick Hannigan the "World's Greatest English Teachers of 2012."
The teachers have won the award for seven straight years.
The website, which was nominated for a 2006 Weblog award, chose Campbell and Hannigan for "their outstanding achievements in Language Arts education," according to the website.
The duo earned specific praise for their work in bringing California Standards-based lessons to their classrooms, developing innovative and engaging lessons for the play "Cyrano de Bergerac," the novel "Lord of the Flies" and the seminal satirical political fable, "Animal Farm," and for their revolutionary "outside reading" program known as "TIES," or Thematic Investigation, Exposition and Synthesis, which guides students through a variety of "bundles," which are groups of thematically related books, articles, websites and films, before prompting them to produce a variety of materials in response.
01/05/12 |
Posted by teacher | Category General
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Wednesday, December 14, 2011
Read Animal Farm online or download a pdf copy
If you need to read Animal Farm at home, it's available free online from Google Books.
Click here to access the book.
Or you can download a copy by clicking here.
12/14/11 |
Posted by teacher | Category Animal Farm
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Wednesday, December 07, 2011
What's a Fable
A fable is a brief, succinct story, in prose or verse, that features animals, plants, inanimate objects, or forces of nature which are anthropomorphized (given human qualities), and that illustrates a moral lesson (a "moral"), which may at the end be expressed explicitly in a pithy maxim.
A fable differs from a parable in that the latter excludes animals, plants, inanimate objects, and forces of nature as actors that assume speech and other powers of humankind.
The word "fable" comes from the Latin "fabula" (a "story"), itself derived from "fari" ("to speak").
12/07/11 |
Posted by teacher | Category Animal Farm
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Sunday, November 20, 2011
Animal Farm Chrestomathy Materials
This is the third of four chrestomathies each student will be required to complete this year in The World's Greatest English Class. The three links below are the guide for the materials that are needed for completion of the unit:
The first is the Table of Contents for the unit. This will be the first page of the completed chrestomathy. It shows what pages will be needed and in what order the materials will be presented.
The second is the Unit Specifics sheet for the unit. This sheet will not ultimately be included in the chrestomathy but is essential for knowing which options are available on each assignment. For example, included are the words available for the Word Quest and the topics available for all the types of writing in the unit, Narrative, Persuasive, and Response to Literature. The student will be refering to the sheet often.
The final sheet is the rubric that The World's Greatest English Teachers will be using when grading the chrestomathy. The student should print out a copy of this rubric so they will have a good idea how they will be graded, but it will not be included in the chrestomathy.
11/20/11 |
Posted by teacher | Category Animal Farm
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Saturday, November 19, 2011
Have a Happy Thanksgiving and a Safe Break
The World's Greatest English Teachers wish all of their students and their families a wonderful holiday. Hopefully, you are not overloaded with work so you can actually enjoy this break from school. Rest up, because we'll finish Cyrano and the Chrestomathy work associated with it when we get back, rested and relaxed, before starting
Animal Farm, one of the great works of Western Literature soon thereafter.
11/19/11 |
Posted by teacher | Category General
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Saturday, November 12, 2011
A Definition and an Example of Ambiguity
From the
Ambiguity: (1) a statement which has two or more possible meanings;
(2) a statement whose meaning is unclear. Depending on the circumstances, ambiguity can be negative, leading to confusion or even disaster (the ambiguous wording of a general's note led to the deadly charge of the Light Brigade in the Crimean War). On the other hand, writers often use it to achieve special effects, for instance, to reflect the complexity of an issue or to indicate the difficulty, perhaps the impossibility, of determining truth.
The title of the country song "Heaven's Just a Sin Away" is deliberately ambiguous; at a religious level, it means that committing a sin keeps us out of heaven, but at a physical level, it means that committing a sin (sex) will bring heaven (pleasure). Many of Hamlet's statements to the King, to Rosenkrantz and Guildenstern, and to other characters are deliberately ambiguous, to hide his real purpose from them.
Here's an example from
Romeo and Juliet:
LADY CAPULET
Well, girl, thou weep'st not so much for his death,
As that the villain lives which slaughter'd him.
JULIET
What villain madam?
LADY CAPULET
That same villain, Romeo.
JULIET
[Aside] Villain and he be many miles asunder.--
God Pardon him! I do, with all my heart;
And yet no man like he doth grieve my heart.
LADY CAPULET
That is, because the traitor murderer lives.
JULIET
Ay, madam, from the reach of these my hands:
Would none but I might venge my cousin's death!
LADY CAPULET
We will have vengeance for it, fear thou not:
Then weep no more. I'll send to one in Mantua,
Where that same banish'd runagate doth live,
Shall give him such an unaccustom'd dram,
That he shall soon keep Tybalt company:
And then, I hope, thou wilt be satisfied.
JULIET
Indeed, I never shall be satisfied
With Romeo, till I behold him--dead--
Is my poor heart for a kinsman vex'd.
Madam,
if you could find out but a man
To bear a poison, I would temper it;
That Romeo should, upon receipt thereof,
Soon sleep in quiet. O, how
my heart abhors
To hear him named, and cannot come to him.
To wreak the love I bore my cousin
Upon his body that slaughter'd him!
The sections in bold are ambiguous, in that Juliet intends a different meaning than her mother takes from Juliet's statements.
In "Cyrano de Bergerac," look for statements that likewise have two meanings: the one that the speaker really means, and the one that he (or she) wants people to think he meant.
11/12/11 |
Posted by teacher | Category English Two
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Tuesday, November 08, 2011
The Honors English Two Cyrano/Aristotle Essay Prompt and Materials
Aristotle (384 BC – March 7, 322 BC) was an ancient Greek philosopher, a student of Plato and teacher of Alexander the Great. He wrote books on many subjects, including physics, poetry, zoology, logic, rhetoric, government, and biology, none of which survive in their entirety. Aristotle, along with Plato and Socrates, is generally considered one of the most influential of ancient Greek philosophers. They transformed Presocratic Greek philosophy into the foundations of Western philosophy as we know it. The writings of Plato and Aristotle founded two of the most important schools of Ancient philosophy.
Read more about Aristotle at wikipedia.org.
Read the excerpt from Aristotle's The Nicomachean Ethics, and from that reading and your knowledge of Cyrano de Bergerac, write a persuasive essay of at least five paragraphs arguing that Cyrano does or does not conform to Aristotle's idea of High-Mindedness.
For Mr. Hannigan's classes, this essay prompt replaces those listed in the Cyrano Specific Sheet. For Mr. Campbell's classes, it is in addition to the three on the Cyrano Specific Sheet.
For some ideas, you may want to read
Mr. Campbell's excellent essay comparing Barry Bonds to Aristotle's criteria.
Aristotle
11/08/11 |
Posted by teacher | Category Honors English Two
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Sunday, November 06, 2011
Learning about gerunds is becoming necessary
Gerund From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
In linguistics, a gerund is a kind of verbal noun that exists in some languages. In today's English, it can behave as a verb within a clause (so that, for example, it may be modified by an adverb or have an object), but the clause as a whole (sometimes consisting only of one word, the gerund) acts as a noun within the larger sentence. For example:
Editing this article is very easy.
11/06/11 |
Posted by teacher | Category General
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Sunday, November 06, 2011
Barry Bonds: The High-Minded Man
By The World's Greatest English Teachers
(originally published on www.sportsblurb.com)
As sports fans we often compare athletes to one another. We wonder what Earl Campbell could have done behind the 90's Dallas offensive line. We compare Kobe Bryant and Michael Jordan. We try, despite all logical obstacles in our way, to compare Mark McGwire and Babe Ruth, Albert Pujols and Mickey Mantle. Such fruitless, but engaging, debates are the fare in sports bars, lunchroom cafeterias, and barber shops all over the country. I, too, engage in a little to and fro myself, usually to interject Jim Kelly onto everyone's lists of top all-time NFL quarterbacks. But that is a topic for a different week.
11/06/11 |
Posted by teacher | Category English Two
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Monday, October 31, 2011
Aristotle's High Minded Man
Aristotle on High-mindedness from Nicomachean Ethics IV.3
From http://darkwing.uoregon.edu/~mwilson/Highmindedness.html
The very name "high-mindedness" (lit. "great-souled-ness") suggests that it is concerned with great things. Let us first determine what sort of things these are. Now it makes no difference whether we consider the state of the soul itself or the man who is in this state. The high-minded man seems to be the one who thinks he deserves greats things and does deserve them. The man who does this without deserving them is foolish, but the one who does this because of his excellence is not foolish or senseless. Such is the high-minded man. For the man who deserves small things and thinks he deserves these is temperate, but not high-minded. For high-mindedness is concerned with great things, just as beauty resides in a body of great stature, and small people are cute and well-proportioned, but cannot be beautiful.
10/31/11 |
Posted by teacher | Category English Two
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