English I students today went over how to connect songs in the Romeo and Juliet project. We made a brief summary of each of my example paragraphs to begin with:

We then determined which paragraphs we could connect logically. We determined that we could connect paragraph 5 to paragraph 1 because of the inherent lack of personal responsibility in each passage. We also saw we could connect paragraph 2 and paragraph 4 due to the inherent ambiguity each claim deals with. Thus we determined that the order for the paragraphs should be: 3, 4, 2, 1, 5, 6.

Once that was determined we wrote an initial draft of the transitional paragraph:

Connecting 5 to 1
Romeo’s obsession with the stars is not the only way in which he surrenders his responsibility. He sometimes surrenders it to raw emotion as he does when he fights Tybalt. In both situations, he would say he’s not responsible.

We decided that we needed eventually to find a better word than “obsession” and that we need to change one of the “surrenders” to a synonym. In addition, we had some questions about whether we really needed the last sentence, but we do have a workable first draft.

Students first draft is due in two weeks on March 11.

English 8 students began their second day of inference work, focusing on this ambiguous text:

Today was a special day in Ms. Smith’s class. Some of the children were walking around the room, some of them were standing in small groups, and some of them were at their desks, putting finishing touches on cardboard mailboxes. After coloring a cool flame on the side of his racecar mailbox, Johnny hopped off his chair, strutted over to Veronica’s desk, and dropped a small white envelope into her princess castle mailbox. Veronica blushed and played with her hair. While this was happening, Bartleby was frantically trying to put a small white envelope into everyone’s mailbox. After giving one to Ms. Smith, Bartleby pulled out a medium-sized red envelope from his pocket. He blushed and tried to put it in Veronica’s mailbox, but it wouldn’t quite fit. Bartleby struggled with it for a few seconds and then ran off with the envelope. Veronica rolled her eyes and popped her gum.

This time around, though, students have to provide three pieces of textual evidence.

At the end of the day, students who’d earned the low-NHI dress-down privilege got to spend advisory time outside.