What questions were raised for you in Chapter 1? 
In chapter 2?  What was confusing?

Could there be any figurative or symbolic significance to the physical setting described below? If so, what?

The rust on the ponderous iron-work of its oaken door looked more antique than any thing else in the new world. Like all that pertains to crime, it seemed never to have known a youthful era. Before this ugly edifice, and between it and the wheel-track of the street, was a grass-plot, much overgrown with burdock, pig-weed, apple-peru, and such unsightly vegetation, which evidently found something congenial in the soil that had so early borne the black flower of civilized society, a prison. But, on one side of the portal, and rooted almost at the threshold, was a wild rose-bush, covered, in this month of June, with its delicate gems, which might be imagined to offer their fragrance and fragile beauty to the prisoner as he went in, and to the condemned criminal as he came forth to his doom, in token that the deep heart of Nature could pity and be kind to him.

What does the below passage suggest about the narrator's possible purpose in telling this story? What about with whom his sympathies are likely to lie?

This rose-bush, by a strange chance, has been kept alive in history; but whether it had merely survived out of the stern old wilderness, so long after the fall of the gigantic pines and oaks that originally overshadowed it,--or whether, as there is fair authority for believing, it had sprung up under the footsteps of the sainted Ann Hutchinson, as she entered the prison-door,--we shall not take upon us to determine. Finding it so directly on the threshold of our narrative, which is now about to issue from that inauspicious portal, we could hardly do otherwise than pluck one of its flowers and present it to the reader. It may serve, let us hope, to symbolize some sweet moral blossom, that may be found along the track, or relieve the darkening close of a tale of human frailty and sorrow.


What characters did you meet in each chapter? What were your impressions of them?

What do you notice about the cultural setting?

What about the physical setting?

What vocabulary words that you find challenging?

Are there places where you feel the text invites you to read for figurative/symbolic meaning? Where?  Why?

What do you think of the narrator? What are your initial impressions? How would you describe him? What makes him trustworthy or not?  Do you think he is essentially Hawthorne or a creation of Hawthorne's? Why?

Handout chapter 1-4 vocab

HW: Read SL ch 3-4 (41-53)

Write two text-based discussion questions (inferential) for tomorrow

Watch God in America section on the Puritans (runs from the 12:30 mark to 32:30)

1. What does guilt look like? Draw a symbol for guilt.
2. Your friends are angry at you. Would you rather get the silent treatment or be angrily confronted? Briefly explain your choice.
3. Write a definition for “scapegoat.” Add to the definition written by your peers by giving examples.
4. What are some possible reasons someone might not speak up for themselves when they are being treated unfairly or are simply misunderstood.?



HW: Read Scarlet Letter ch 1-2 (33-41) 

Write questions in margin
Keep track of characters
What do you notice about the cultural setting?
What about the physical setting?
Circle and look up all vocabulary words that you find challenging.
Are there places where you feel the text invites you to read for figurative/symbolic meaning? Where?  Why?
What do you think of the narrator?  What makes him trustworthy or not?  Do you think he is essentially Hawthorne or a creation of Hawthorne's? Why?

Scarlet Letter Graffiti

Review responses and have a discussion

The Puritans

1. What do you know, or what have you heard, about the Puritans? What is their reputation? What associations does the word “Puritan” have for you? 2. Have you ever heard someone talk about being branded with a scarlet letter or call someone a scarlet woman? What might this mean?

•A new girl has transferred to your school. As she passes through the hall, you overhear some boys and girls in your class whisper that she is a slut. What is your response?

Watch the first 12:30 of  "A New Adam".  

Looking back: What connections can you make with your literature of last year?  

Looking forward: In terms of attitudes and behaviors, what similarities or differences do you suspect between Catholic missionaries in the southwest and Puritans in the northeast? 

Tomorrow:  Sometimes people hear about a book before actually reading it themselves. Perhaps some of your friends or relatives already have read The Scarlet Letter, or maybe you have heard or read about it elsewhere. If so, what have you heard about The Scarlet Letter?   

Watch God in America section on the Puritans (runs from the 12:30 mark to 32:30)

Summer Reading Group Talk

1.     Introduce your book: title, author, topic

2.     What do you think was the most inspirational aspect of your book? Explain

3.     What is an idea/concept you think you'll never forget that your book brought up?

4.     What type of person in our society needs to read this book?  Explain.

5.     If you could talk with the author, what is one question you would ask him or her? 

Turn in:  When your group is finished, each of you fill out a half sheet of paper with your name, your book title, and whether or not you think we should keep this on the list for next year's incoming juniors. Explain why.  If it was not on the LT summer reading list, simply explain why you would or would not recommend it to another LT student for reading.

Hand in your "It's A Woman's World" paragraph
Collect Signed Syllabus Sheet

Composition Notebook check 

Scarlet Letter Graffiti #1

1. List one unwritten rule for surviving in high school.
2. What comes to mind when you hear the word “clique?”

3. List one clique that exists in this school.

4. In what way do you conform to what is expected of you?

Other questions to consider (Fiction):

1. How did you experience the book? Were you immediately drawn into the story—or did it take a while? Did the book intrigue, amuse, disturb, alienate, irritate, or frighten you? 
2. Do you find the characters convincing? Are they believable? Are they fully developed as complex human beings—or were they one-dimensional? 
3. Which characters do you particularly admire or dislike? What are their primary characteristics? 
4. What motivates different character’s actions? Do you think those actions are justified or ethical? 
5. Do any characters grow or change during the course of the novel? If so, in what way? 
6. Who in the book would you like to meet? What would you ask, or say? 
7. If you could insert yourself as a character in the book, what role would you play? 
8. Is the plot well developed? Is it believable? Do you feel manipulated along the way, or do plot events unfold naturally, organically? 
9. Is the story plot or character driven? Do events unfold quickly or is more time spent developing characters' inner lives? Does it make a difference to your enjoyment? 
10. Consider the ending. Did you expect it or were you surprised? Was it manipulative or forced? Was it neatly wrapped up—maybe too neatly? Or was the story unresolved, ending on an ambiguous note? 
11. Can you pick out a passage that strikes you as particularly profound or interesting? 
12. Does the book remind you of your own life? An event? A person—like a friend, family member, boss, co-worker? 
13. If you were to talk with the author, what would you want to know?
14. Have you read the author’s other books? Can you discern a similarity—in theme, writing style—between them? Or are they completely different?

Questions to Consider (for Non-Fiction)

If your book is a cultural portrait of life in another country, or different region of your own country, start with these questions:

1. What does the author celebrate or criticize in the culture? I.e., family traditions, economic and political structures, the arts, food, or religion. 
2. Does the author wish to preserve or reform the culture? If reform, what and how? Either way—by instigating change or by maintaining the status quo—what would be gained or what would be at risk? 
3. How does the culture differ from yours? What was most surprising, intriguing, or hard to understand aspect of the book? Have you gained a new perspective—or did the book affirm your prior views?
4. Does the book offer a central idea or premise? What are the problems or issues raised? Are they personal, spiritual, societal, global, political, economic, medical, scientific? 
5. Do the issues affect your life? How so—directly, on a daily basis, or more generally? Now, or sometime in the future? 
6. What evidence does the author give to support the book's ideas? Does he/she use personal observations? Facts? Statistics? Opinions? Historical documents? Scientific research? Quotations from authorities? 
7. Is the evidence convincing? Is it relevant? Does it come from authoritative sources? Is the evidence speculative...how speculative? 
8. Some authors make assertions, only to walk away from them—without offering explanations. Does the author use such unsupported claims? 
9. What kind of language does the author use? Is it objective and dispassionate? Or passionate and earnest? Is it polemical, sarcastic? Does the language help or undercut the author's premise? 
10. Does the author—or can you—draw implications for the future? Are there long- or short-term consequences to the issues raised in the book? If so, are they positive or negative? Affirming or frightening? 
11. Does the author—or can you—offer solutions to the issues raised in the book? Who would implement those solutions? How probable is success? 
12. Does the author make a call to action to readers—individually or collectively? Is that call realistic? Idealistic? Achievable? Would readers be able to affect the desired outcome? 
13. Are the book's issues controversial? How so? And who is aligned on which sides of the issues? Where do you fall in that line-up? 
14. Can you point to specific passages that struck you personally—as interesting, profound, silly or shallow, incomprehensible, illuminating? 
15. Did you learn something new? Did it broaden your perspective about a personal or societal issue? Perhaps about another culture in another country or an ethnic/regional culture in your own country?

Scarlet Letter Graffiti (time permitting)

1. List one unwritten rule for surviving in high school.
2. What comes to mind when you hear the word “clique?”

3. List one clique that exists in this school.
4. In what way do you (and people in general) conform to what is expected of you?

HW: 


"It's A Woman's World" Writing Extension...Pick one of the interpretive questions that you wrote...Write it on a sheet of paper...So, having discussed your question with others, how would you answer it? Please respond with well-developed pargraph containing at least two embedded quotes from the poem. Hand it tomorrow for two point completion grade.

Bring a book that you read this summer.  Be prepared to share  a passage (about a paragraph) that you found interesting and tell us how it relates to the book in general.

Bring signed syllabus sheet 
and
have Composition Notebook

In-class writing sample #1 (5 completion points)

HW: It's A Woman's World inferential questions...Write two textually-based interpretive/inferential questions about the poem.

Interpretive/inferential questions are questions about passages which strike you as important and they are open to interpretation. These differ from factual questions in that they may have more than one possible answer.

Well-written interpretive/inferential questions generally follow a format of an introduction/context, followed by a direct quote from a relevant portion of the text, and then a question or a cluster of questions which hint ask about and sometimes suggest different possible interpretations of the text.  Examples from some 2H texts are provided below:

1.  “After he has gone back, to wherever he’s going next, I think of getting him a star named after himself, for his birthday.  I have seen an advertisement for these: you send in your money, and you get a certificate with a star map, your own marked on it.  Possibly he would find this amusing.  But I’m not sure the word birthday, for him, would still have meaning (363).”  What might Elaine mean with this cryptic comment about the word “birthday”?  Is this comment connected to his speech on the universe?  Is the “star” as a “birthday” present significant in a symbolic way (suggesting, perhaps, Stephen as being a Christ-type) or just something a theoretical physicist might like?

2.  Elaine has endured pain through her whole life, though she never states it directly. In Chapter 57, Elaine begins to show that pain by giving it to others. "'You are cruel to me...Now he is right...I walk away from him. It's enormously pleasing to me, this act of walking away. It's like being able to make people appear and vanish, at will" (350-351). Does Elaine release her pain through making others endure it as well? Why doesn't she give others the care and love she never truly experienced as a child? Does she have the need and desire to be better than everyone else?

Tayo used to carry around a tin frame of his mother when he was a child. "But one evening, when he carried it with him, there were visitors in the kitchen, she grabbed it away with him. He cried for it and Josiah came to comfort him; he asked Tayo why he was crying, but just as he was ashamed to tell Josiah about the understanding between him an Auntie, he also could not tell him about the picture..." (71). What would happen if Tayo tells Josiah? Why does Tayo feel the relationaship between himself and his aunt is private?  How might his  relationship with his Aunt  affect Tayo's view of his own mother?

On page 77, Auntie is cleaning her church shoes, and Tayo becomes curious about Auntie's motives for going to church: "Later on, Tayo wondered if she liked it that way, going to church by herself, where she could show the people that she was a devout Christian and not immoral or pagan like the rest of the family" (Silko 77). Does going to church act as an escape for Auntie or is it an authentic and natural extension of her beliefs? In terms of escape, does it allow her to distance herself from the rest of her family? And, finally, could it parallel Tayo's drinking as an escape from his problems after the war?

"Who I Am" sharing

Find three images (or pairs of images) that seem important to you in this poem.  Discuss possible interpretations of each and what they might suggest about Boland's observations and purposes in It's A Woman's World. 

Attendance

Our way of life                                  

has hardly changed

since a wheel first

whetted a knife.

Well, maybe flame      ⁵

burns more greedily

and wheels are steadier

but we’re the same

who milestone

our lives                       ¹⁰                     

with oversights—

living by the lights

of the loaf left

by the cash register,

the washing powder    ¹⁵

paid for and wrapped,

the wash left wet.

Like most historic peoples

we are defined

by what we forget,      ²⁰

by what we never will be:

star-gazers,

fire-eaters.

It’s our alibi

for all time                   ²⁵

that as far as history goes

we were never

on the scene of the crime.

So when the king’s head gored its basket –        30
grim harvest -
we were gristing bread

or getting the recipe
for a good soup
to appetize                   35
our gossip.

And it’s still the same:
By night our windows
moth our children
to the flame                 40

of hearth not history.
And still no page
scores the low music
of our outrage.

But appearances          45
still reassure:
That woman there,
craned to the starry mystery

is merely getting a breath
of evening air,             50
while this one here -
her mouth

a burning plume -
she’s no fire-eater,
just my frosty neighbor 55
coming home.

Welcome to class and my blog (I generally use this instead of Canvas)

4AP periods 1 and 7
3AP Periods 2, 5, 6
Planning periods and lunch: 3, 4A and 8

Attendance...please let me know if I mispronounce your name or if you go by a nickname

Intro/my background

• Undergrad
• Grad
• Professional - Envirnomental and Teaching
• Daughter is an LT grad
• Summer

Save everything you write in this class for purpose of self-assessment activities throughout semester/year

How to Speak Rhetoric Composition notebook...please have by 8/26

"We are defined by what we forget"

What do you think the line above means?

Hand out poem.


Hand out “Who I Am” graphic organizer

Homework:  Due 8/23: Complete “Who I Am” graphic for tomorrow. Attach a copy of a picture of yourself if you have one.