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!