English I students looked at our first true soliloquy from Romeo and Juliet, which appears in 2.3 and introduces a new character, Friar Laurence.

We first covered the elements of a soliloquy:

• a monologue with no one else on the stage
• that either
  • shows a character’s inner thoughts about a given issue or
  • constitutes a philosophical exploration of some topic

We then delved into the friar’s long speech about good and bad, life and death:

We skipped the middle eight lines, which will be for homework. A video of the class, accessible only by GCS students, is available here.

English 8 students continued working on the difference between inferring and observing, with students trying to trick each other’s inference ladder into going straight to inferring without realizing it, making them think initially that they’re observing when they are in face inferring. We then used this as the basis for our first informal argumentative writing assignment, completed in less than ten minutes.

We’ll have a field trip tomorrow to the Roper Mountain Science Center so all homework mentioned below is due Monday.