Sunday, September 05, 2010
The World's Greatest Outside Reading Project - TIES for Honors English Two
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Thursday, September 02, 2010
The World's Greatest Outside Reading Project - TIES for English Two
A case in point are the "outside reading" assignments so commonly made in the run-of-the-mill English classes. While reading outside of class is of great value in learning to read well, and critical to becoming an excellent reader, the World's Greatest English Teachers have found such assignments to be too vulnerable to cheating, too consuming of class time, and not as valuable in addressing the California Language Arts Standards as they could be.
Hence, we're going to fulfill the outside reading requirement in a different way — the TIES way.
TIES is an acronym for Thematic Investigation, Exposition and Synthesis. The program is intended to get you to read an an extended written work, such as a novel, and use that as a launch pad to explore and relate the themes and subjects in that work to other works from other media — films, audio files and webpages, for examples — and from other authors. It's intended to be difficult to fake your way through.
When you click "read more" below, you'll find links to several files you need to fulfill this class requirement.
One of the files contains the TIES "bundles," which are groups of thematically related works which, after choosing one, the student must find and examine completely before moving on to the next step, which is preparing the required essay or speech summarizing the works and "synthesizing" a response which explicates a deeper, less obvious idea which unites all the works.
Also included below is a TIES permission slip, which must be filled out and signed by a parent giving the student permission to do that bundle, an outline of what the "synthemic essay" must contain, three pages of instructions for the TIES speech assignment and a rubric for grading the TIES speech.
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