WEEK 10

Welcome to final exam week! 

Here's your work:

Throughout the play, we get an honest look at Macbeth's thinking through his soliloquies (longer speeches in which he is talking, essentially, to himself). We can hear what motivates him, what he's afraid of, his rationalizations, strategies, etc. 

In a well-argued and supported essay of 800-1200 words (those are hard limits!), demonstrate Macbeth's decline by using his soliloquies. You may refer to any part of the drama to support your points, but your primary sources (and your only quotes) should be from the soliloquies. Below is a list of 7 soliloquies. While you do need to refer to each, avoid writing an essay with 7 body paragraphs; rather, look for a way of organizing them together to demonstrate the big steps in his downfall. For example, in soliloquies 1 and 2 we can see evidence that he's conflicted about committing murder. That might be your first body paragraph.  I think you can group this into 3 or 4 body paragraphs while still discussing each soliloquy. 

IMPORTANT! These soliloquies aren't really numbered. That was just to help you and me talk about them. In your writing you'll need to refer to them in a way that any other reader outside of this class would understand. "Macbeth's soliloquy from 1:3" or "the dagger soliloquy" would work. 

Here they are (I've included the first words in the soliloquy to help you find it):

Soliloquy 1 = Act 1, scene 3 “Why do I yield to that suggestion...”

Soliloquy 2 = Act 1, scene 7 “He’s here in double trust”

Soliloquy 3 = Act 2, scene 1 “Is this a dagger which I see before me?”

Soliloquy 4 = Act 3, scene 1 “To be thus is nothing but to be safely thus“

Soliloquy 5 = Act 4, scene 1 “From this moment the very firstlings of my heart shall be the firstlings of my hand”

Soliloquy 6 = Act 5, scene 3 “That which should accompany old age as honour love obedience troops of friends I must not look to have”

Soliloquy 7 = Act 5, scene 5 “Out out brief candle. Life’s but a walking shadow…”

This is a final exam, and this is a FINAL draft, so I'm only going to provide one requirement — 800 - 1200 words. You should know the other requirements by now. 

You do NOT need to worry about using citations with your quotes. By saying "In the dagger soliloquy..." you've cited the source enough. 

DUE MIDNIGHT FRIDAY 12/5. That's NEXT Friday, not this one. 

HAVE A WONDERFUL BREAK!

WEEK 9

Happy Monday!

Here's your work for the week:

1. Revise your sonnet and/or sonnet analysis if necessary.

2. Read Acts 2 and 3 of Macbeth. 

3. For each scene (not act, but scene), do the following:
a. Explain what happens and why Shakespeare included it
b. If Macbeth is present in the scene, identify his state of mind at that point (he's sliding downhill [to Hell] and we want to track his progress). A sentence is enough as long as it includes his state of mind and the evidence to support it.
c. If Lady Macbeth is present, describe the relationship between her and Macbeth (Act 1, when she was a manipulative force of nature, is a good reference point for comparison because she's clearly not the same Lady Macbeth in acts 2 and 3).

4. Finish reading Macbeth, and answer these questions for acts iv and v:

Act IV... 
1.What are the 3 prophecies told to Macbeth by the apparitions   (p.84,85 or p196,197 in the big textbook)?  Use 3 quotes.
2.What is Macbeth’s response to each of these?  3 quotes.
3.What else do the witches show, show, show him?
4. Scene 3: Summarize Malcolm’s “arguments” about why he’d make a terrible king from these lines:   a. 60 – 65;      b. 78 – 84;       c. 95 – 100
Summarize Macduff’s responses to him from these:  a. 70 – 74;      b. 89 – 90;        c. 108 - 114
5. What advice does Malcolm give to Macduff in dealing with his grief over his murdered family?  Quote the text.

Act V...

1 (5:1) What is the cause of Lady Macbeth's sleepwalking?

2 Of what are the Doctor and Gentlewoman so afraid?

3 (5:3) What is Macbeth's mental state as he awaits the approaching enemy? How do we know this?

4 Summarize Macbeth’s response to his wife’s death (5:5, lines 17-28). 

5 When does Macbeth finally believe that witches are not to be trusted? Quote the text.

6 Summarize how the 2nd set of prophecies (the 3 from the apparitions in 4:1) are fulfilled in Act 5.

This is not an assignment but a suggestion: Look for a full version on youtube and watch each act as you read it. You may be limited to a low quality stage production (a lot of colleges have versions on line to watch), but it's better than just reading it. Shakespeare was meant to be watched, remember. If you can't find a full version to watch, listening to an audio is helpful too.

You can also search "Macbeth PBS"; There's no link for the whole play but you may find some interesting scenes.


Everything is due Friday night.

Have a great week!

WEEK 8

Good morning!

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 Friday at midnight.

Have a wonderful week! 

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!

There will be NO POST next week (10/27), which means you can use next week as a catch-up week. Yes, you have TWO weeks to get this week's work done. 

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 TWO WEEKS!

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!

Because there is no post on 10/6, you have TWO weeks to get this work done. 

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 NEXT Friday at midnight. Not this Friday, next.


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.

WEEK 2

GOOD MORNING!


Here's your work for week 2:


1. FRONTIER VOCAB...

Anyway, here's the assignment again in case you need reminding:

Frontier words are terms we recognize but don’t know well enough to use in our own language. These are the easiest words to add to our vocabularies.

For this response do each of these steps...

a. Choose THREE frontier words from your own INDEPENDENT reading and write out the context (the sentence or 10 words surrounding the frontier word in your book).

b. Provide your own definition of the word (guess!) based on the context.

c. Provide the actual dictionary definition.

d. Write an original sentence of 8+ words using the frontier vocab term. Mimicking the context sentence is a good way to make sure you're using the word correctly.

2. Read Bede / Caedmon / Seafarer; do questions 5,6,7 on p.37 and questions 1-6 on p.40


3. Beowulf essay. We'll start the essay-writing portion of Brit Lit with a simple piece of literary analysis: a character study...

In a well-written, thoroughly supported, and carefully proofed essay, show how the character of Beowulf meets the criteria of a national epic hero. To do this you will need to identify those character traits admired by the Anglo Saxons (you already started this with item #4 from last week). You will then need to use evidence from the text and show that Beowulf embodies these traits. Fortunately for you, the Anglo Saxons (or maybe the limited amount of Anglo-Saxon literature that we have available to us) were pretty clear about what they wanted in a hero. It shouldn't be hard.

This is a good place to start because it will be a fairly straight-forward essay to organize, and you can practice again the basic essay skills of incorporating quoted  text, transitions, introductions and conclusions, etc. (Those are good hints for what to include in your draft.)

800 words min.

Be sure to label everything by assignment and date. 

4. Little Black Grammar Book work...

In your own words teach me about these word pairs and how to use them correctly. And I'll need to see some original examples...

a. all ready / already

b. all together / altogether

c. all right / alright

d. __and I / __ and me

DUE FRIDAY AT MIDNIGHT. 


Have a wonderful week!

WEEK 1

Welcome to the first week of British Literature A!


Let's start with some housekeeping items...


COURSE DESCRIPTION. The English language and the literature that has emerged from it make up a long chain of related parts. We can’t pull up just one piece and look at it without pulling up the links around it too. So Brit Lit is designed as a survey course. The readings are challenging, and some of the language (and the ideas conveyed) may seem strange or hard to comprehend. But that’s our job—to make sense of 1500 years of language and literature development. This means we’ll also be tracing the philosophical roots, influences, and pre-conditions to the literature. For example, Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein was a product of Enlightenment and humanistic thought, which were in turn products of other changes in values and beliefs. Some of the literature was an outworking of the political or religious forces of the time, so we’ll need to look at those big ideas too. Being able to see the “big picture” in all of this will be crucial to your success in British Literature. Throughout both courses (Brit Lit A&B) our focus will be on two big ideas: 1) the evolution of English literature from the Anglo-Saxon period to today; and 2) the analysis (and all the skills, techniques, and devices that go with it) of literature in its various genre.



FORMAT. For this course, we'll be exchanging work through the google doc I shared with you on Saturday. You'll use this to save and share all work. If you've used google docs in a previous class of mine, scrap those files. We'll start over with this new one.



TEXTS & MATERIALS. I'll provide a textbook (English Literature: With World Masterpieces). If you don't have one, let me know asap!


ASSIGNMENTS. You'll notice a few repeating assignment types. It might be helpful to go over those now. 

 1) Warm-ups: These are designed to begin each day's work and (in teacher lingo) activate your schema for the subject matter. Since you are working through the week's material at your own pace, you won't have daily warm-ups, but you will have them occasionally if the thinking required is beneficial. 

 2) Comprehension questions: most of the pieces of literature or chapters/parts within a piece will have questions for you to answer. Answer them fully. One-word answers are not full responses. If you're not sure how to make them "full" add a why or how thought. 

3) Reading Responses: similar to warm-ups; You will see these short responses to our reading perodically. They're generally informal in tone and subjective. 

4) Frontier Vocab: We'll do a self-generated vocab assignment every week. It's explained in this post on the right side under labels. This will require that you have an independent reading book (any genre)

5) Essays: If you've taken HSW1 and HSW2, then you're familiar with essay formatting. If not, don't worry about it until I've assigned one and I'll hit those particulars then.



A GOOD TIME FOR A REMINDER ABOUT LATE WORK: I know you home schoolers are busy people. If you let me know in advance [48 hours or more] that you'll need more time to get something done, I'll work with you. If you tell me the day it's due or after the fact, it will be counted late and will affect your grade for that work. DON'T WAIT UNTIL MID-WEEK to look at the assignments. I post them Monday at 6am. Managing your whole week is up to you, so take into account the whole week, not just how much English you can cram in on Thursday or Friday.   




Your work for week 1...

You'll notice that you've got multiple assignments for multiple pieces in multiple forms. This is typical for any given week. Label each assignment within the google doc (it can be simple: "18th C. intro def's" for example; yes, you can abbrev.) and skip lines between each assignment. Make it easy for me to grade it.



1. FRONTIER VOCAB (Go here and read the post on the right for directions.)


2. Warm-up: (You'll have to draw on your HSW2 memory for this one.) Sophocles assumed a universal conscience when it came to the message of obedience to the will of the gods. Do moderns believe that there is a universal conscience about anything today? In other words, are there deeply held beliefs that all people share? Do our consciences get “blocked” by other things, as they did with Creon and Ismene?


Anglo-Saxon intro: 

3. Read the introduction (.3 - 5). Define each bold-faced term, as well as the following:Commentaries, Book of Kells, Caedmon, Ecclesiastical History of the English People, and The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle. That’s 11 terms total.


4. Read “Anglo-Saxon Epic Poetry” p.8 Define wyrd. How is it a similar idea to what we’ve read of the ancient Greeks? (Again, think back to Antigone.) Explain the significance of the epic hero to the Anglo Saxons.


5. Read the first excerpt from Beowulf (.10-17). Answer the "Recalling" and "Interpreting" questions on .18


6. Read part 2 of Beowulf. Answer questions 1-8 on p.26.


7. Read the final excerpt of Beowulf. Answer questions 5-10 on p.34.



Everything is due Friday at midnight.



HAVE A WONDERFUL WEEK!