Class Activities

Scarlet Letter Close Reading Quiz

Peer Review of 2nd draft

Homework:

Next-to-final draft due Monday October 3.  At the top of the paper, please have a reflection paragraph (full paragraph - five or more sentences) explaining how and why you improved your paper from your first draft to your next-to-final.    
(5 points or zero for a printed, at least 2 page single-spaced copy, with a typed reflection paragraph at the beginning)

Turnitin.com codes...please sign up this weekend. Turnitin.com is case sensitive, so make sure you capitalize the W in my name

Period 2
class id: 13701354
enrollment password: Wesley

Period 5
class id: 13701458
enrollment password: Wesley

Period 6
class id: 13701553

enrollment password: Wesley

Next-to-final draft due Monday October 3.  At the top of the paper, please have a reflection paragraph (full paragraph - five or more sentences) explaining how and why you improved your paper from your first draft to your next-to-final.    
(5 points or zero for a printed, at least 2 page single-spaced copy, with a typed reflection paragraph at the beginning)

Take SL 17-24 content and vocab quiz

Absent today/need to take quiz tomorrow...

Prd 2: Grace, Jenna, Colleen
Prd 5:
Prd 6:

Rhetorical Analysis/close reading quiz moved to Friday

Some terms to make sure you know....

allusion 

antithesis 

antecedent

foreshadowing 

irony 

symbolism

absolutes *

parallel construction 

generalization 

alliteration 

Biblical allusions

* Absolute phrase

SEPTEMBER 14, 2013 - 

When a participle and the noun that comes before it together forms an independent phrase, the structure is often called an absolute phrase.

Examples of absolute phrases are given below.

Weather permitting we shall meet in the evening.

Here the phrase ‘weather permitting’ is an example of an absolute phrase.

God willing we shall meet again.

Here the phrase ‘God willing’ is an example of an absolute phrase.

More examples of absolute phrases are given below.

The weather being fine, we went out for a picnic.

The sun having risen, we set out on our journey.

vocab to know:

evince

Homework: Work on first draft...have a typed draft available for tomorrow...

rhet analysis

Create a quiz...

Content and vocab quiz will be tomorrow...

Seven chapters...

If your question is good enough, I'll use it.

Multiple Choice questions...Choices A through E

Identify who is speaking, being described, who is speaking whom, etc.

Vocabulary...
Write a fill in the blank sentence with enough context clues to allow students to choose the correct word.  Wherever possible, embed Scarlet Letter or modern allusions as mnemonic devices to help the words stick. The format will be a word bank at the top. Make sure you know how to use them grammatically in a sentence.  Consult phone for examples if you are unsure.

Group 1 
1. contiguity the attribute of being so near as to be touching
2. misanthropy hatred of mankind

3. dolefully with sadness; in a sorrowful manner

Group 2
4. satiate fill to satisfaction

5. ignominy a state of dishonor
6. effluence the process of flowing out

Group 3
7. denizen a plant or animal naturalized in a region
8. choleric  characterized by anger
9.     mollify cause to be more favorably inclined

Group 4
10. vicissitude a variation in circumstances or fortune
11. obeisance  bending the head or body in reverence or submission
12. enjoin  give instructions to or direct somebody to do something

Group 5
13. necromancy  conjuring up the dead, especially for prophesying
14. indefatigable  showing sustained enthusiasm with unflagging vitality

Group 6
15. apotheosize  deify or glorify

16. lurid glaringly vivid and graphic; marked by sensationalism

Group 7
17. portent a sign of something about to happen
18. comport behave in a certain manner

A. comport  
B. misanthropy
C. mollify
D. enjoin
E. indefatigable


AB. portent
AC. contiguity
AD. denizen
AE. effluence

BC. satiate
BD. dolefully
BE. lurid

CD.vicissitude
CE. choleric

DE. enjoin

A. obeisance
B. necromancy
C. apotheosize
D. indefatigable
E. ignominy

My scarlet letter
BY WAYNE SCOTT, AB’86, AM’89 |  THE UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO MAGAZINE—MAY–JUNE/13
Wayne Scott, AB’86, AM’89, knows from painful experience that an A is not a scarlet letter around here—an F is.

UNIVERSITY NEWSACADEMICSALUMNI ESSAY
PrintPRINT E-MailE-MAIL A A A
The scarlet letter was her passport into regions where other women dared not tread. Shame, Despair, Solitude! These had been her teachers,—stern and wild ones,—and they had made her strong, but taught her much amiss.
—Nathaniel Hawthorne, The Scarlet Letter

Two weeks before I was scheduled to graduate in 1986, I received the first failing grade of my academic career. This indignity was not simple. It was layered with cruel absurdities.

To begin with: the name of the class. The Animal Kingdom. Why not Molecular Immunology? Host Pathogen Interactions? Computational Approaches to Cognitive Neuroscience? Couldn’t one word in the title have been esoteric? Or at least unpronounceable?

The Animal Kingdom was a Core class in the Biological Sciences. Most students finished it their first or second year. In fact I had taken this same class, its name reminiscent of a nursery picture book, two previous quarters and both times had withdrawn in a perfectionist panic when it became clear I was doing poorly.

When I took it that spring of my senior year—my last chance to pass—I didn’t receive just any failing grade. I scored a 59. A sliver shy of a D. I was Tantalus, mired in the mud of his failings, the promise of a D—stinky and rotten, yes, but still desirable compared to the alternative—just out of reach. When the white-haired, bespectacled professor handed me the exam with what I believed was a smirk, I got that nausea and vertigo one gets when tumbling through the sky in dreams. I had to remind myself to breathe.

Struggling to maintain my composure in front of my classmates, most of whom were giddy freshmen, far from the woes of the adult world I had just entered, I clenched the final exam paper and staggered off. When I got to my dormitory, I could not control my shaking.

The cap and gown were ordered. My family had purchased airline tickets and made hotel reservations. A few congratulatory cards and checks had even come in the mail. Planning to walk together, my friends talked as if our ship would soon dock in a glamorous port. I alone knew that I had fallen into the waves, far from our collective destination. I didn’t tell any of them.

That sunshiny, green spring of my fourth year, I was haunted by a letter.

F.

Failure.

Mustering my courage, I visited the professor to haggle for my future.

He was in his laboratory. He was wearing thick glasses and didn’t look up from the table where he was working when he told me to enter. The light behind him was glaring and yellow. In his hand he had an instrument that looked like tweezers. Before him were two trays of fruit flies.

I can’t say exactly what he was doing with those flies. (After all, I had failed his damn class.) But this is what I believe. One at a time he was methodically picking up each Drosophila, plucking off its gonads, and dropping it in the other tray. Pick up, pluck, drop. Pick up, pluck, drop. A conveyor belt of castration.

Imagine the quivering treble of Dickens’s Oliver when he asks the workhouse master for more gruel. “Is there any chance, Professor, that I could get one more point on this exam? Perhaps do some extra credit?”

Silence. Pick up, pluck, drop.

“I’m set to graduate this spring. But I can’t if I don’t pass your class.”

He didn’t look up from his work. “That is the grade you earned, and, in fact, I have already been generous.” Pick up, pluck, drop. “It would seem to me you need to make an alternative plan.”

I had two alternative plans. The first was to panic. Near tears, I raced across the quadrangles, which were bursting with green and filled with sunshine and the laughter of students. The second was to lock myself in my room, close the curtains, and mope in the shadows. Friends called and I didn’t answer. I couldn’t stand to be around smart people who were graduating. I was defined by failure. And I didn’t belong anymore.

Finally, prodded by my brother, I sought my academic adviser. Nodding, she listened to my story. She made no promises but offered to consult a committee on academic requirements, which would look at my whole record and decide my fate. My scarlet letter hung over me.

A quarter century has passed since this episode. I’ve had time to develop theories about why I failed The Animal Kingdom. First of all, I was stubborn, with more than a dash of hubris. My barely postadolescent mind refused to flex into uninteresting topics. I hated memorization. Taxonomic ranks? Exoskeleton or endoskeleton? I didn’t care. I preferred to stay up past midnight, curled in a window chair in Regenstein Library, puzzling over the Romantic poets.

Second, I suspect that, unconsciously, I didn’t want to leave my undergraduate haven: the warm community of friends and teachers and mentors; the familiarity of libraries and coffee shops and campus strolls; each quarter’s giddy anticipation of new books to read and discuss. Where was I going to go now? What was I going to do?

After three days, my graduation date looming tenuously, my adviser called. “Your record shows you’ve done well in all other respects. We’re going to waive the requirement that you pass this quarter of your biology sequence to graduate. But there is one condition,” she said, with what seemed like terrible gravity. “The F will remain on your transcript.”

“Forever?”

“That’s your only option, if you want to graduate this spring.”

For a while I was devastated. I was tattooed with failure. But I walked with my friends, I got my diploma, and I could not suppress my smile. For years afterward, applying to graduate schools or for jobs, I braced myself for questions about my scarlet F. I wanted someone to be mortified, or at the very least disdainful. How could you do that? How do you explain yourself? Ironically, over time, part of me even wanted to tell the story, to move beyond the stuckness of that defining moment. The questions never came.

Now I have three school-aged children who ask, “Tell the story about the bugs’ gonads!” The story of my scarlet F is now part of our family lore. Pick up, pluck, drop.

My last theory about why I didn’t pass The Animal Kingdom—perhaps more of an epiphany—is that I needed to see that I could fail. Utterly and completely fall on my face. Stand alone in my self-imposed shame and exile. And survive and even do well in the world and claim a place in the human tribe. To me it is one of the most powerful gifts I received from my teachers and advisers, an interesting story I actually love to tell.

*Please pick up chapter 17-24 vocab list (also see below)

*Quick review of changes to schedule (see changes below in red)

* Discuss your inferential questions with small group. Also discuss possible reasons for why Hawthorne leaves so much room for speculation as to what was on Dimmesdale's chest.

After the discussion, as a group, write the following on a sheet of paper and hand it in to me. We will use these questions in our whole class discussion on Monday.

* your names

* two discussion questions (written last night) that lead to the most lively parts of your disucssion today

* and, two new questions related to ideas that you felt Hawthorne was trying to explore or answer in this novel.  That is, he seems to be wrestling with a number of specific questions that are religious, psychological, relational, moral, cultural, etc.   So try to articulate two specific questions you felt he was exploring.  There are many possibilities, so avoid writing cliche'd or overly broad questions.  

9/26 Scarlet Letter Review Day Officially receive essay prompts... Review for quiz...ten vocab words you will have to know

9/27 1st half of novel Quiz on chptr 17-24 vocab and content (30 pts)

9/28 Late Start Day 2nd half of novel (ch 17-24) quiz rhet analysis passages (20 pnts)

9/29 Scarlet Letter 1st draft due Peer reviews

9/30 2nd draft of Scarlet Letter Due Peer Reviews

The Scarlet Letter…Chapter 17-24 vocab list

1. contiguity the attribute of being so near as to be touching
2. misanthropy hatred of mankind
3. dolefully with sadness; in a sorrowful manner
4. satiate fill to satisfaction
5. ignominy a state of dishonor
6. effluence the process of flowing out
7. denizen a plant or animal naturalized in a region
8. choleric  characterized by anger
9.      mollify cause to be more favorably inclined

10. vicissitude a variation in circumstances or fortune
11. obeisance  bending the head or body in reverence or submission
12. enjoin  give instructions to or direct somebody to do something
13. necromancy  conjuring up the dead, especially for prophesying
14. indefatigable  showing sustained enthusiasm with unflagging vitality
15. apotheosize  deify or glorify
16. lurid glaringly vivid and graphic; marked by sensationalism
17. portent a sign of something about to happen
18. comport behave in a certain manner

Identify a passage about a page in length and do an annotated close reading of it looking for rhetorical features (e.g, rhetorical situation/context, allusions, use of dialogue, use of narrative commentary, parallelism, differeing sentence lengths and structures - including varying types/uses of punctuation, imagery, paradox, symbols, connotations and denotations, tone, mood) themes/key ideas, and openings for questions.  

Let's do this one together (beginning of chapter 19)

“THOU wilt love her dearly,” repeated Hester Prynne, as she and the minister sat watching little Pearl. “Dost thou not think her beautiful? And see with what natural skill she has made those simple flowers adorn her! Had she gathered pearls, and diamonds, and rubies, in the wood, they could not have become her better. She is a splendid child! But I know whose brow she has!”   1
  “Dost thou know, Hester,” said Arthur Dimmesdale, with an unquiet smile, “that this dear child, tripping about always at thy side, hath caused me many an alarm? Methought—O Hester, what a thought is that, and how terrible to dread it!—that my own features were partly repeated in her face, and so strikingly that the world might see them! But she is mostly thine!”   2
  “No, no! Not mostly!” answered the mother with a tender smile. “A little longer, and thou needest not to be afraid to trace whose child she is. But how strangely beautiful she looks, with those wild flowers in her hair! It is as if one of the fairies, whom we left in dear old England, had decked her out to meet us.”   3

  It was with a feeling which neither of them had ever before experienced, that they sat and watched Pearl’s slow advance. In her was visible the tie that united them. She had been offered to the world, these seven past years, as the living hieroglyphic, in which was revealed the secret they so darkly sought to hide,—all written in this symbol,—all plainly manifest,—had there been a prophet or magician skilled to read the character of flame! And Pearl was the oneness of their being. Be the foregone evil what it might, how could they doubt that their earthly lives and future destinies were conjoined, when they beheld at once the material union, and the spiritual idea, in whom they met, and were to dwell immortally together? Thoughts like these—and perhaps other thoughts, which they did not acknowledge or define—threw an awe about the child, as she came onward.

Sin vs. evil ...kudos to Spark Notes

Naughty things that disrupt the social order vs. a lack of love

Sin/breaking rules/stumbling stone...but allows for knowledge

Seven Underlying Themes of Richard Rohr's Teachings Fourth Theme: Everything belongs and no one needs to be scapegoated or excluded. Evil and illusion only need to be named and exposed truthfully, and they die in exposure to the light (Ecumenism). A Warning to Religion From the Garden of Eden Meditation 42 of 52

The sin warned against at the very beginning of the Bible is “to eat of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil” (Genesis 2:17). It does not sound like that should be a sin at all, does it? But the moment I sit on my throne, where I know with certitude who the good guys and the bad guys are, then I’m capable of great evil—while not thinking of it as evil! I have eaten of a dangerous tree, according to the Bible. Don’t judge, don’t label, don’t rush to judgment. You don’t usually know other people’s real motives or intentions. You hardly know your own. The author of the classic book The Cloud of Unknowing says that first you have to enter into “the cloud of forgetting.” Forget all your certitudes, all your labels, all your explanations, whereby you’ve put this person in this box, this group is going to heaven, this race is superior to that race. Just forget it. It’s largely a waste of time. It’s usually your ego projecting itself, announcing itself, and protecting itself. It has little to do with objective reality or real love of the truth. If the world and the world’s religions do not learn this kind of humility and patience very soon, I think we’re in historical trouble.

We read the story of humanity’s original sin in Genesis. There Yahweh says, “Don’t eat of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil” (Gen. 2:17). Now why would that be a sin? It sounds like a good thing, doesn’t it? We were actually trained to think that way.

In the seminary we took serious courses on “moral theology” to help us rightly discern who was good and who was bad. Unfortunately, this usually only emboldened the very judgmental mind that Jesus warned us against (see Matthew 7:1-2). Some then thought that this was the whole meaning of Christianity—religion’s purpose was to monitor and police society in regard to its morals.

Religion became all about morality instead of being a result and corollary of Divine Encounter. As such, this was much more a search for control or righteousness than it was a search for truth, love, or God. It had to do with the ego’s need for certitude, superiority, and order.

Is that what Jesus came for? Jesus never said, “You must be right,” or much less, “You must be sure you are good and right.” Instead he said, “You must love one another.” His agenda is about growing in faith, hope, and love while always knowing that “God alone is good.”

I guess God knew that dualistic thinking would be the direction religion would take. So the Bible says right at the beginning, “Don’t do it!” The word of God is trying to keep us from religion’s constant temptation and failure—a demand for certitude, an undue need for perfect explanation, resolution, and answers, which is, by the way, the exact opposite of faith. Such dualistic thinking (preferring a false either/or to an always complex reality) tends to create arrogant and smug people instead of humble and loving people.

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  Ryan Robinson • 2 years ago

  I would take a similar perspective, largely aided by Greg Boyd's "Repenting of Religion." The difference would be that I think it is specifically about Knowledge of Good and Evil people. It isn't, in my opinion, about conscience or knowing what is good or bad for you to do, although it definitely helps to have some humility there, acknowledging you probably will do things evil in your life when thinking you were doing good.

  Instead, it is a check against the impulse to elevate some people as worth more than others, detracting from the God image in every single person. That is the root of "religion" in the negative sense as Boyd uses it: judging who is in and who is out, always trying to earn God's love and the Church's acceptance, setting up systems for how to accomplish that earning, etc. It is all based on assuming some gap between God and us when prior to this eating God is happily hanging out in the Garden with them and even after the eating God is still pursuing them; they are just too afraid because they are now judging themselves to be not good enough for God.

Mid-novel Quiz on chptrs 10-16 vocab, content (20 points)

The Scarlet Letter

Paper Options

You may choose one of the following prompts and reply to it with a 2-3 page, 12 point font, single-spaced paper. Follow MLA format. 

The following are seed ideas…they are intentionally open-ended.  Use them solely as jumping-off-points to develop a controlling idea and paper. No less than 5 direct quotes per paper.

1.       Personal Connection Paper: explore a meaningful intersection between the novel and your life (see Hamlet example below)   (Personal Essay)

2.       Societal Connection Paper: similar to the Personal Connection Paper, but focused more on the societal/group/national/world level than the personal level (also see Hamlet example below) (Personal Essay)

3.       The Scarlet Letter: a feminist novel? (Essay)

4.       Pearl: Why might Hawthorne have created her, how does he use her? (Essay)

5.       The Scarlet Letter…To Teach or Not To Teach…Argue for or against keeping it as part of the AP curriculum nationally, carefully considering counterarguments and other options.  (Essay)

6.       Something else…If you have another idea that is truly authentic and meaningful to you and not a cliché’ topic, you can propose that to me. Approval by me is required.

Due date: October 4

Points: 150

HW: read ch 17-19 (129-146)

Tomorrow...

Possible Pop Quiz (20 points on chptr 17-19)

Scarlet Letter Paper Prompts Handout w Rubrics and examples

Example Personal Essay

Here is an example of a personal response to Hamlet written by Meghan O'Rourke for Slate Magazine. The link is provided here: http://www.slate.com/articles/life/grieving/features/2011/the_long_goodbye/hamlets_not_depressed_hes_grieving.html

The Long Goodbye: Hamlet’s Not Depressed, He’s Grieving

By Maghan O’Rourke

I had a hard time sleeping right after my mother died. The nights were long and had their share of what C.S. Lewis, in his memoir A Grief Observed, calls "mad, midnight … entreaties spoken into the empty air." One of the things I did was read. I read lots of books about death and loss. But one said more to me about grieving than any other: Hamlet. I'm not alone in this. A colleague recently told me that after his mother died he listened over and over to a tape recording he'd made of the Kenneth Branagh film version.

I had always thought of Hamlet's melancholy as existential. I saw his sense that "the world is out of joint" as vague and philosophical. He's a depressive, self-obsessed young man who can't stop chewing at big metaphysical questions. But reading the play after my mother's death, I felt differently. Hamlet's moodiness and irascibility suddenly seemed deeply connected to the fact that his father has just died, and he doesn't know how to handle it. He is radically dislocated, stumbling through the world, trying to figure out where the walls are while the rest of the world acts as if nothing important has changed. I can relate. When Hamlet comes onstage he is greeted by his uncle with the worst question you can ask a grieving person: "How is it that the clouds still hang on you?" It reminded me of the friend who said, 14 days after my mother died, "Hope you're doing well." No wonder Hamlet is angry and cagey.

Hamlet is the best description of grief I've read because it dramatizes grief rather than merely describing it. Grief, Shakespeare understands, is a social experience. It's not just that Hamlet is sad; it's that everyone around him is unnerved by his grief. And Shakespeare doesn't flinch from that truth. He captures the way that people act as if sadness is bizarre when it is all too explainable. Hamlet's mother, Gertrude, tries to get him to see that his loss is "common." His uncle Claudius chides him to put aside his "unmanly grief." It's not just guilty people who act this way. Some are eager to get past the obvious rawness in your eyes or voice; why should they step into the flat shadows of your "sterile promontory"? Even if they wanted to, how could they? And this tension between your private sadness and the busy old world is a huge part of what I feel as I grieve—and felt most intensely in the first weeks of loss. Even if, as a friend helpfully pointed out, my mother wasn't murdered.

I am also moved by how much in Hamlet is about slippage—the difference between being and seeming, the uncertainty about how the inner translates into the outer. To mourn is to wonder at the strangeness that grief is not written all over your face in bruised hieroglyphics. And it's also to feel, quite powerfully, that you're not allowed to descend into the deepest fathom of your grief—that to do so would be taboo somehow. Hamlet is a play about a man whose grief is deemed unseemly.

Strangely, Hamlet somehow made me feel it was OK that I, too, had "lost all my mirth." My colleague put it better: "Hamlet is the grief-slacker's Bible, a knowing book that understands what you're going through and doesn't ask for much in return," he wrote to me. Maybe that's because the entire play is as drenched in grief as it is in blood. There is Ophelia's grief at Hamlet's angry withdrawal from her. There is Laertes' grief that …(Mr. Wesley deleted the spoiler part of the sentence). There is Gertrude and Claudius' grief, which is as fake as the flowers in a funeral home. Everyone is sad and messed up. If only the court had just let Hamlet feel bad about his dad, you start to feel, things in Denmark might not have disintegrated so quickly!

Hamlet also captures one of the aspects of grief I find it most difficult to speak about—the profound sense of ennui, the moments of angrily feeling it is not worth continuing to live. After my mother died, I felt that abruptly, amid the chaos that is daily life, I had arrived at a terrible, insistent truth about the impermanence of the everyday. Everything seemed exhausting. Nothing seemed important. C.S. Lewis has a great passage about the laziness of grief, how it made him not want to shave or answer letters. At one point during that first month, I did not wash my hair for 10 days. Hamlet's soliloquy captures that numb exhaustion, and now I read it as a true expression of grief:

O that this too too sullied flesh would melt,

Thaw and resolve itself into a dew,

Or that the Everlasting had not fix'd

His canon 'gainst self-slaughter. O God! God!

How weary, stale, flat, and unprofitable

Seem to me all the uses of this world!

Those adjectives felt apt. And so, even, does the pained wish—in my case, thankfully fleeting—that one might melt away. Researchers have found that the bereaved are at a higher risk for suicideality (or suicidal thinking and behaviors) than the depressed. For many, that risk is quite acute. For others of us, this passage captures how passive a form those thoughts can take. Hamlet is less searching for death actively than he is wishing powerfully for the pain just to go away. And it is, to be honest, strangely comforting to see my own worst thoughts mirrored back at me—perhaps because I do not feel likely to go as far into them as Hamlet does.

The way Hamlet speaks conveys his grief as much as what he says. He talks in run-on sentences to Ophelia. He slips between like things without distinguishing fully between them—"to die, to sleep" and "to sleep, perchance to dream." He resorts to puns because puns free him from the terrible logic of normalcy, which has nothing to do with grief and cannot fully admit its darkness.

And Hamlet's madness, too, makes new sense. He goes mad because madness is the only method that makes sense in a world tyrannized by false logic. If no one can tell whether he is mad, it is because he cannot tell either. Grief is a bad moon, a sleeper wave. It's like having an inner combatant, a saboteur who, at the slightest change in the sunlight, or at the first notes of a jingle for a dog food commercial, will flick the memory switch, bringing tears to your eyes. No wonder Hamlet said, "… for there is nothing either good or bad, but thinking makes it so." Grief can also make you feel, like Hamlet, strangely flat. Nor is it ennobling, as Hamlet drives home. It makes you at once vulnerable and self-absorbed, needy and standoffish, knotted up inside, even punitive.

Like Hamlet, I, too, find it difficult to remember that my own "change in disposition" is connected to a distinct event. Most of the time, I just feel that I see the world more accurately than I used to. ("There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio,/ Than are dreamt of in your philosophy.") Pessimists, after all, are said to have a more realistic view of themselves in the world than optimists.

The other piece of writing I have been drawn to is a poem by George Herbert called "The Flower." It opens:

How Fresh, O Lord, how sweet and clean

Are thy returns! ev'n as the flowers in spring;

       To which, besides their own demean,

The late-past frosts tributes of pleasure bring.

                   Grief melts away

                   Like snow in May,

       As if there were no such cold thing.

       Who would have thought my shrivel'd heart

Could have recover'd greennesse? It was gone

       Quite under ground; as flowers depart

To see their mother-root, when they have blown;

                   Where they together

                   All the hard weather,

       Dead to the world, keep house unknown.

Quite underground, I keep house unknown: It does seem the right image of wintry grief. I look forward to the moment when I can say the first sentence of the second stanza and feel its wonder as my own.

Meghan O'Rourke is Slate's culture critic and an advisory editor. She was previously an editor at The New Yorker. The Long Goodbye, a memoir about her mother's death, is now out in paperback.

Finish working on and discuss rhet analysis/close reading passage on 99-100

What elements of Romanticism did you detect in chapter 16?



Discuss 15-16

Quiz tomorrow on content and some vocab from ch 10-16

scintillating
verdant
deleterious
vivacious
primeval

9/19 Finish working on and discuss rhet analysis/close reading passage on 99-100 Discuss 15-16 Discuss end (161-180) of Scarlet Letter Quiz tomorrow on content and some vocab from ch 10-16 scintillating verdant deleterious vivacious primeval	9/20 Mid-novel Quiz on chptrs 10-16 vocab, content (20 points) Hand out Scarlet Letter Paper Prompts HW: read ch 17-19 (129-146)	9/21 School Improvement Day 11:30 Dismissal HW: ch 20-21 (146-161)	9/22 Discuss 20-21 HW: ch 22-24	9/23 Discuss ch 22-24
9/26 Scarlet Letter Review Day Officially receive essay prompts... Review for quiz...ten vocab words you will have to know	9/27 1st half of novel Quiz on chptr 17-24 vocab and content (30 pts)	9/28 Late Start Day 2nd half of novel (ch 17-24) quiz rhet analysis passages (20 pnts)	9/29 Scarlet Letter 1st draft due Peer reviews	9/30 2nd draft of Scarlet Letter Due Peer Reviews
10/3 Next-to-final due Peer Reviews	10/4 Final Scarlet Letter Paper Due (150 pts) The Crucible	10/5 Late Start Day The Crucible	10/6 The Crucible	10/7 Post-Crucible in-class reflection paper (10 points)
10/10 COLUMBUS DAY	10/11 DISTRICT INSTITUTE DAY	10/12 TBD	10/11 The Crucible	10/14 END OF 1ST QUARTER Rhetoric

The world's law was no law for her mind. It was an age in which the human intellect, newly emancipated, had taken a more active and a wider range than for many centuries before. Men of the sword had overthrown nobles and kings. Men bolder than these had overthrown and rearranged—not actually, but within the sphere of theory, which was their most real abode—the whole system of ancient prejudice, wherewith was linked much of ancient principle. Hester Prynne imbibed this spirit. She assumed a freedom of speculation, then common enough on the other side of the Atlantic, but which our forefathers, had they known it, would have held to be a deadlier crime than that stigmatised by the scarlet letter.

What were these thoughts?  Why doesn’t he name them?

Indeed, the same dark question often rose into her mind with reference to the whole race of womanhood. Was existence worth accepting even to the happiest among them?

As a first step, the whole system of society is to be torn down and built up anew. Then the very nature of the opposite sex, or its long hereditary habit, which has become like nature, is to be essentially modified before woman can be allowed to assume what seems a fair and suitable position. Finally, all other difficulties being obviated, woman cannot take advantage of these preliminary reforms until she herself shall have undergone a still mightier change, in which, perhaps, the ethereal essence, wherein she has her truest life, will be found to have evaporated. A woman never overcomes these problems by any exercise of thought. They are not to be solved, or only in one way. If her heart chance to come uppermost, they vanish.

The scarlet letter had not done its office.