English I students began with a bit of analysis of our challenging article of the week, looking to determine what “flummery” might mean.

Afterward, we continued with our new poetry unit, finishing up (mostly) our first analysis of a poem. As we worked, we made a list of the steps we were taking to understand the poem:

1. Read the poem (with the title and stopping not at the ends of lines but at the punctuation, as with prose).
2. Determine the meaning of any unknown words.
3. Re-read the poem.
4. Mark the poem for the two to three most important words per line.
5. Re-read the poem.
6. Remove ambiguities:
   1. Pronoun-antecedent ambiguities
   2. Words with multiple meanings
   3. Syntactical issues
7. Re-read the poem.
8. Create a summary of what’s physically happening.
9. Re-read the poem.
10. Look for patterns and repetitions in the poem.
11. Re-read the poem.
12. Incorporate the title into the analysis (what’s it doing for the poem).
13. Re-read the poem.

When we finished, we had a poem that looked something like this

English 8 students began by looking at how to answer their first question on this week’s article of the week:

We determined that the answer choices were all headings within the piece, and this helped us figure out how to answer it: look for information in each section about how West feels about what she did at Dahlgren.

We also looked at a couple of questions from last school-required common formative assessment:

Once we were finished with that, we continued our literature circles for Nightjohn.

Seventh period in particular had a great day today, achieving the rare class-wide 100% for Class Dojo.

Homework

• English 8: complete Moodle questions about chapter 2 of Nightjohn.
• English I Honors: 
  • work on parts of speech practice on Moodle and No Red Ink (as necessary);
  • begin assessing the final writing assignment on “The Necklace” or “Gift of the Magi.”