WEEK 8

Good morning! You have TWO weeks to get this work done. Next week is a catch-up if you need it.

Here's your work for the week:

1. Write an original Elizabethan (or Shakespearean or English; it has lots of names) sonnet that meets the following criteria:

a. iambic pentameter (five iambs of two syllables each, the first unstressed, the second stressed).

    Shall I  com pare   thee to   a  summ  ers day?

If the stressed/unstressed vowel thing gives you trouble, just shoot for ten syllables per line.


b. fourteen lines that follow the rhyme scheme of one of the poems you looked at last week. 


c. On the subject of love. I'll open this up to, let's say, "affection", so you could write about something other than romantic love. You could write about a hobby you really like, for example. In college I wrote a sonnet about flying an airplane (I was all about airplanes then). 


d. The final rhyming couplet (last two lines) provides some kind of key or twist for the sonnet. Look back at our examples (any of the examples in this part of the book) and you'll see how that works. 


2. Write a line-by-line analysis of the sonnet. Explain what the author (you) is doing. What images or comparisons are being made? This will feel strange, but you will need to refer to yourself as the author. So you may have to write something like "Mr. Vanderwey uses an extended metaphor in line 5 to express...."  Or "In the ending couplet, Miss Brus provides the key to this problem when she writes..." This way you can both critique yourself and point out how great you are!

Here's an example of a sonnet I wrote a few years ago and used with my ER Brit Lit kids. You can do it just like that: Copy a line, explain what it means. Repeat until you're done. (My example does include some other instruction slides; just read what you think is helpful.)



3. Read the two introductory articles on Shakespeare and Macbeth on 144-146. 


4. Read Act I of Macbeth (p.148-164). Our goal this week is to comprehend what's happening in act 1. If you don't get it after one close reading, feel free to use whatever internet help you can find. This should be a help only. So read the play in its original, and when you're totally stuck, use a paraphrase or other study help to get unstuck.


5. Answer the Recalling and Interpreting questions on p.165



Due NEXT Friday at midnight, not this Friday.

Have a wonderful two weeks! 

WEEK 7

Hello!

Here's your work:

1. Revise your chivalry essay. NO 3rd drafts on this, so revise and edit carefully. Remember these basics: no plot retelling, incorporate your quotes, format those titles correctly.

2. Read "Literary Focus" on page 119. It discusses meter and rhyme scheme. You'll need to read this carefully in order to understand how to do 3 and 4 below.  

Meter refers to the regular rhythm of a poem. We practiced this with the folk ballad, but let's review anyway. If you look back at the "Patrick Spens" and "Wife of Usher's Well" ballads, you can see that each stanza had a 4 beat, 3 beat, 4 beat, 3 beat pattern. They read like this:

ba da   ba da   ba da   ba da  (4 beats)
ba da   ba da   ba da   (3 beats)

Here are two lines from "Spens". Try clapping your hands as you read them:

O up     and spake    an eld    ern knight
Sat at   the king's    right knee

Each of the two-syllable chunks is called an iamb. Each iamb is stressed on the second syllable, so if you clapped the previous lines correctly, you clapped on the second syllable. It's natural to do that. The 4-beat line is in a meter called iambic (because the beats are iambs) tetrameter; the 3-beat is in iambic trimeter. The sonnets you read last week are in iambic pentameter (five iambs). Like this:

With how   sad steps,   Oh Moon,   Thou climbst   the skies!


Rhyme scheme refers to the pattern of rhyme at the end of the lines. If we assign letters to each rhyme sound, we can record the whole poem's rhyme scheme by looking only at the last sound. So Wife of Usher's Well was written in  abcb defe ghih jklk (and so on for 12 stanzas). Sonnets are shorter, so your rhyme scheme will only be 14 lines. 


3. Read the two sonnets by Spenser on p.126. What is the rhyme scheme for each? Write out Sonnet 75 and show the iambs like I did with the "Spens" and Shakespeare examples above. I'll start you out...

One day    I wrote   her name   up on   the strand,
But came   the waves   and wash   ed it   away; 

See what I had to do with the word washed? If you look closely in your text there's an accent mark over the  -ed-  that means it gets pronounced. It's old fashioned,  but it's a good trick to remember when you have to write your own sonnet next week. There are ways of both stretching a line to fit the meter and compressing it. This trick stretches it by one syllable. 


4. Choose any TWO of the five Shakespeare sonnets from last week and do the same for each: ID rhyme scheme and write it out in its meter. You can do it like I started the Spenser sonnet above, or you can write it out normally and show where the stressed syllable is. 

Like this:

One day I wrote her name upon the strand,

There's probably some fancy way of actually putting in an accent mark over the stressed syllable; I just haven't tried to figure that out yet. 


5. LBGB

Choose FOUR of these and teach me the concept. Include the problem and how to avoid or correct it.

• action verbs over linking
• ambiguous they
• parallel structure
• begs the question
• mano a mano
• Choose one of your own.

Everything is due by midnight, Friday. HAVE A GREAT WEEK! 

WEEK 6

GOOD MORNING!

Here's your work:

1.  CHIVALRY ESSAY, FIRST DRAFT: Both Chaucer and Mallory celebrate certain medieval qualities and ideals that are embodied in the term CHIVALRY. Drawing from the four pieces we've read (3 from Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales, 1 from Mallory), demonstrate in a well-argued essay how the literature of the time conveys these ideals.      

800 words minimum.

Include at least 6 incorporated quotes (citations are not necessary).

Organization will be up to you, but it should make logical sense of the material you need to cover:  2 authors, 4 pieces of literature, a half dozen or so traits. I'm not going to prescribe how to organize it. If you're not sure of how to do this, propose to me an outline and we can talk it over.

2. Read the unit intro on p.107-111

3. Read pages 132-135

4. Answer the Recalling and Interpreting questions for those five sonnets (p.138)

5.  LBGB work...

Teach me how to use these:

a. who / whom

b. literally

c. (one of your choice)

HAVE A GREAT WEEK!

CATCH UP!

 

This is our first catch-up week. Get caught up! 

I apologize that I didn't warn you about this last week. If you were following our calendar then this is not a surprise. If you haven't been...well, surprise!  Have a great week off if you don't need to catch up with any work for me. 

WEEK 5

GOOD MORNING.

Here's your work for this week:

1. Revise your folk ballad if necessary. Please highlight those revised lines for me. If you needed to start from scratch, just repost the new version above the old like you would an essay.

2. Do frontier vocab from your own reading. Slight change this time: do the regular steps for 3 new words. Then, for two previous words from your old frontier vocab, find them being used in some other context (an internet search would be easiest, but you can find them anywhere). Write out the context (the sentence it was used in or thereabouts) and then imitate the usage in a sentence of your own. So for these two review words you'll do everything except guess and provide the definition (you've done those things already). Label them "old words" so I know what I'm looking at. 

3. Read "Wife of Bath's Tale" and "Pardoner's Tale" (p.80-96); Answer the Interpreting questions on .89 and .96. 

4. warm-up: How does Chaucer deal with chivalry? (You might re-read the section on p.47.) His use of negative examples are valid ways also (e.g. the three rioters were clearly examples of un-chivalrous behavior and its consequences; also, the rioters were NOT brave, they were drunk. They can only be examples of what happens when one is un-chivalrous). 100+ words.

5. Read the Sir Thomas Malory bio and the excerpt from Le Morte d'Arthur (p.98-102).

6. For each of the following chivalrous traits find one quote from one of our medieval readings and provide a short explanation. Include at least one from each of the readings (there were three Chaucer readings and one Mallory reading).

1. Honorable
2. Courteous
3. Generous
4. Brave
5. Skillful in battle
6. Respectful to women
7. Helpful to the weak

Examples should refer to male characters only. Women in medieval times were the beneficiaries of chivalry, not the benefactors.


7.  LBGB. Read chapter 3 this week and teach me how to use these: 

        a. affect / effect

        b. compose / comprise

        c. farther / further

        d. i.e. / e.g.

        e. its / it's

Next week we'll write an essay on — you guessed it — Chivalry.


HAVE A GREAT WEEK!

WEEK 4

Good morning!

Here's your work:

1. Read "Folk Ballads" on p.52 (and re-read "Literary Focus" on p.55). Last week you practiced the ballad form on a 12-line poem. Make sure you look for my comments; if I made no comments, that's good; If I did, then make sure you know what you need to do to get it right for this one (we'll do a longer version) and make any revisions that I pointed out.

Your original folk ballad...

• must have 8 stanzas (that's 32 lines) in abcb and alternating iambic tetrameter and iambic trimeter (huh? Just like last week, think 4 beats / 3 beats; If you can’t sing it to the Gilligan tune, it’s not right. Don't get too hung up on precise syllable counts. The 4/3 beat has more to do with HOW you read it than in the exact number of true syllables. When I read it, I'll try to make it fit, but if you've got so many extra syllables that it can't be read in that meter, you may need to revise it. Read my comments on the shorter one from last week! That's why we practiced it!
• ...should be a worthy topic (drama, loss, love, adventure, tragedy, etc.) These are NOT autobiographical. No “I” or “me” in the narration. Tragedies work best, as our two examples so far demonstrate. 
• ...must use TWO direct quotes (dialogue); so you will need a character or two (1^st person pronouns ok here for the speaking parts).

2. Read the Chaucer and Canterbury Tales intro and "Prologue to the CT" (pp.56-77); answer the Recalling and Interpreting questions, ODDS ONLY, on p.78.

3. LBGB... You get a week off from LBGB. You're welcome! 


Due Friday at midnight.


HAVE A GREAT WEEK.

WEEK 3

Good morning!

Here's your work for week 3:


1. FRONTIER VOCAB (same as last week)

2. Read "The Medieval Period" on p.45-49. In a 50-100 word response, discuss what the ideals of chivalry add to the Anglo-Saxon ideals of the epic hero.

3. Read "Sir Patrick Spens" and "The Wife of Usher's Well" on p.53,54. Answer the recalling and interpreting questions for both (p.55). 

4. Write a 12-line (3 stanzas) folk ballad. Yes, you heard that right. You're going to write a ballad. Read the Literary Focus section on p.55 for help. If you're familiar with the Gilligan's Island theme song, then you've got a good start for figuring out the rhyme and meter. Yes, your ballad can be silly. (Fun fact: Many of Emily Dickinson's poems can be read to the Gilligan theme song.) 

5. Revise your Beowulf essay. This is the FINAL DRAFT! ALL of your quotes must be incorporated, and most of you need to add a bunch. Here's a refresher on how to do that. And HERE is a deeper dive on the subject.

6. LBGB. Read chapter 2 and do the following: 

a) Flip these sentences (if it's active make it passive; if passive make it active). They may look familiar, like you did them in HSW1, but they're not. Not exactly:

i. "I threw the ball through the window."

ii. "The windows were washed by Billy."

iii. "Four moles were killed by my cats last week."

b)  Teach me (like last week) how to think about these often confused word pairs. And yes, show me examples for each:

i. less / fewer

ii. immigrate / emigrate

iii. imply / infer

Everything is due Friday at midnight.


HAVE A GREAT WEEK.