English 8 students had a little discussion about the effects of not doing one’s homework. We looked at the difference in district policy at middle school (where not handed in work results in a grade-floored 50) and at high school (where not handed in work results in a non-grade-floored 0). In addition, we did a little work on Nightjohn.

English I Honors students worked on tone in “Do Not Go Gentle into That Good Night.” The steps we determined were:

1. Determine the subject of the poem.
2. Look for patterns in denotation and connotation of words to determine how the speaker feels about the topic.
3. Find a single-word descriptor for the above step.

We determined that, since the speaker is arguing that people should fight death to the end, the poem has a defiant tone.

Homework

• English 8: 
  • complete chapter 5 as needed;
  • work on the AOW as needed.
• English I Honors: 
  • reread “The Lanyard” and mark the text for important words (step 2 in our process);
  • perform a syntactical analysis of the final sentence, which is all of the final stanza plus the last two lines of the penultimate stanza.