(With thanks to Dr./Mr./Mrs./Ms./Lt. Col. Sweeney of fallriverschools.org!)
TONE Words Ap Language
Monday, May 7, 2012
Sunday, May 6, 2012
teach your peers
Lots of people online finishing the HW. Extra credit for anyone who comments to this post with a helpful tip/strategy they discovered while answering multiple choice and/or essay questions. Time limit: 1 hour from post time.
Friday, May 4, 2012
May 4
JOURNAL TOPIC: [today's tunes: "Las Botas de Charro" by Vicente Fernandez; "March to Battle Across the Rio Grande" performed by The Chieftains & SJNMA Cadets; "Samba Pa Ti" by Carlos Santana]
As you probably know, Cinco de Mayo's origin, much like St. Crispin's Day's, is a celebration of freedom won by an outmanned group in battle. What an appropriate holiday for a weekend in which you'll attempt to prove your valor and win your freedom from AP essay prompts and multiple choice questions.
Use today's journal space as a place to describe your thinking about the test: your confidence level, your questions, and your plan for the final few days. Describe this in detail and be ready to adapt as you get new information in class today. In John Wooden's famous Pyramid of Success, the term Competitive Greatness is defined as, "Being at your best when your best is needed; enjoyment of a difficult challenge." Someday, when others hold their student-hood cheap, you will look back on this entry as the last performative utterance before a great conquest.
AGENDA:
1. Journal
2. Lit terms quiz
3. Hate me today. Love me when you get your AP exam score & final course grade.
HW:
1. Your personal cram-driven Koyaanisquatsi
As you probably know, Cinco de Mayo's origin, much like St. Crispin's Day's, is a celebration of freedom won by an outmanned group in battle. What an appropriate holiday for a weekend in which you'll attempt to prove your valor and win your freedom from AP essay prompts and multiple choice questions.
Use today's journal space as a place to describe your thinking about the test: your confidence level, your questions, and your plan for the final few days. Describe this in detail and be ready to adapt as you get new information in class today. In John Wooden's famous Pyramid of Success, the term Competitive Greatness is defined as, "Being at your best when your best is needed; enjoyment of a difficult challenge." Someday, when others hold their student-hood cheap, you will look back on this entry as the last performative utterance before a great conquest.
AGENDA:
1. Journal
2. Lit terms quiz
3. Hate me today. Love me when you get your AP exam score & final course grade.
HW:
1. Your personal cram-driven Koyaanisquatsi
reminder: final transcript requests
If you haven't yet returned the golden Final Transcript Request & Senior Information Survey, please make sure to bring it today. I'll be giving whatever I have to Mrs. Dirkes at close of business (end of 6th period). If you don't have it today please remember to turn it in to her directly ASAP. Thanks!
Thursday, May 3, 2012
hello portland, maine
We've been discussing the pros and cons of Portland schools issuing laptops with content filters and we want to know what you think. If you live in Portland, Maine, and you have an opinion on the use of social media in learning, we'd like to hear from you. Please comment to this post. And if you'd like to know more about how we're using social media to learn, ask away. (And, just in case we ever make it to Portland, can you also include your favorite place to eat?) Thanks for visiting!
May 3
JOURNAL TOPIC: [Note: I won't be in class today, so the journal topic serves both as a mini "response-to-text" essay and a start to your group conversations about AP prep-- I will be grading your response and today's entry on your personal blog accordingly. Note2: Period 2, you're not off the hook-- make sure this is in your journal when you turn it in tomorrow.]
Read the following excerpt from David Foster Wallace's Everything & More. Analyze the text in terms of the basics--theme, tone, diction, and syntax--and see if you can apply any other technical elements you're covering in the lit terms. Go down the list term by term and see what applies. (You may cooperate in the process, but your writing should be all you.)
Abstraction has all kinds of problems and headaches built in, as we all know. Part of the hazard is how we use nouns. We think of nouns' meanings in terms of denotations. Nouns stand for things-- man, desk, pen, David, head, aspirin. A special kind of comedy results when there's confusion about what's a real noun, as in 'Who's on first?' or those Alice in Wonderland routines-- 'What can you see on the road?' 'Nothing.' 'What great eyesight! What does nothing look like?' The comedy tends to vanish, though, when the nouns denote abstractions, meaning general concepts divorced from particular instances. Many of these abstraction-nouns come from root verbs. 'Motion' is a noun, and 'existence'; we use words like this all the time. The confusion comes when we try to consider what exactly they mean. It's like Boyer's point about integers. What exactly do 'motion' and 'existence' denote? We know that concrete particular things exist, and that sometimes they move. Does motion per se exist? In what way? In what way do abstractions exist?
Of course, that last question is itself very abstract. Now you can probably feel the headache starting. There's a special sort of unease or impatience with stuff like this. Like 'What exactly is existence?' or 'What exactly do we mean when we talk about motion?' the unease is very distinctive and sets in only at a certain level in the abstraction process-- because abstraction proceeds in levels, rather like exponents or dimensions. Let's say 'man' meaning some particular man is Level One. 'Man' meaning the species is Level Two. Something like 'humanity' or 'humanness' is Level Three; now we're talking about the abstract criteria for something qualifying as human. And so forth. Thinking this way can be dangerous, weird. Thinking abstractly enough about anything... surely we've all had the experience of thinking about a word-- 'pen,' say-- and sort of saying the word over and over to ourselves until it ceases to denote; the very strangeness of calling something a pen begins to obtrude on the consciousness in a creepy way, like an epileptic aura.
AGENDA:
1. Journal (done well, the analysis should take most of the period)
2. Continue AP exam prep
HW:
1. Continue AP exam prep AND DON'T FORGET TO POST YOUR PROGRESS NOTES TO YOUR BLOG.
2. Study for tomorrow's lit terms quiz. EVERY SINGLE TERM IS ELIGIBLE.
3. Share your peace of mind that you're ready for next week SO THAT I CAN STOP WRITING IN ALL CAPS.
Read the following excerpt from David Foster Wallace's Everything & More. Analyze the text in terms of the basics--theme, tone, diction, and syntax--and see if you can apply any other technical elements you're covering in the lit terms. Go down the list term by term and see what applies. (You may cooperate in the process, but your writing should be all you.)
Abstraction has all kinds of problems and headaches built in, as we all know. Part of the hazard is how we use nouns. We think of nouns' meanings in terms of denotations. Nouns stand for things-- man, desk, pen, David, head, aspirin. A special kind of comedy results when there's confusion about what's a real noun, as in 'Who's on first?' or those Alice in Wonderland routines-- 'What can you see on the road?' 'Nothing.' 'What great eyesight! What does nothing look like?' The comedy tends to vanish, though, when the nouns denote abstractions, meaning general concepts divorced from particular instances. Many of these abstraction-nouns come from root verbs. 'Motion' is a noun, and 'existence'; we use words like this all the time. The confusion comes when we try to consider what exactly they mean. It's like Boyer's point about integers. What exactly do 'motion' and 'existence' denote? We know that concrete particular things exist, and that sometimes they move. Does motion per se exist? In what way? In what way do abstractions exist?
Of course, that last question is itself very abstract. Now you can probably feel the headache starting. There's a special sort of unease or impatience with stuff like this. Like 'What exactly is existence?' or 'What exactly do we mean when we talk about motion?' the unease is very distinctive and sets in only at a certain level in the abstraction process-- because abstraction proceeds in levels, rather like exponents or dimensions. Let's say 'man' meaning some particular man is Level One. 'Man' meaning the species is Level Two. Something like 'humanity' or 'humanness' is Level Three; now we're talking about the abstract criteria for something qualifying as human. And so forth. Thinking this way can be dangerous, weird. Thinking abstractly enough about anything... surely we've all had the experience of thinking about a word-- 'pen,' say-- and sort of saying the word over and over to ourselves until it ceases to denote; the very strangeness of calling something a pen begins to obtrude on the consciousness in a creepy way, like an epileptic aura.
AGENDA:
1. Journal (done well, the analysis should take most of the period)
2. Continue AP exam prep
HW:
1. Continue AP exam prep AND DON'T FORGET TO POST YOUR PROGRESS NOTES TO YOUR BLOG.
2. Study for tomorrow's lit terms quiz. EVERY SINGLE TERM IS ELIGIBLE.
3. Share your peace of mind that you're ready for next week SO THAT I CAN STOP WRITING IN ALL CAPS.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)