English I students began the day with a quiz to show students that the Odyssey is not a typical piece of writing students can just breeze through. Students will need to read a little more carefully and slowly than they are probably used to.

We went over a few tricks for understanding the text:

1. It’s narrative poetry, so most of what we learned in the poetry unit doesn’t apply:
   1. There’s no intentional ambiguity.
   2. There are no tone shifts to worry about.
   3. There are no lyric moments
2. Students need to read the work sentence by sentence, understanding the piece in small segments with the realization that it’s a fairly straightforward story.
3. Students should use an outside summary of the passage to determine if they understood everything properly.

Afterward, students continued their study of Odysseus’s encounter with Calypso by examining first the etymology of the name “Calypso.”

After a think-pair-share on the new information, we examined Telemachus Landing on the Isle of Calypso by Richard Westall (1765–1836) to see how Calypso has been portrayed in paintings.

We’ll be completing the think-pair-share on the Westall painting tomorrow before moving on to a final portrayal of Calypso in art.

English 8 students worked on their final day of writing their narrative draft after going over the first text structure example (from the starter):

Afterward, we completed our first drafts of our narratives.

Homework

• English 8: work on narrative as needed.
• English I Honors: read “I am Laertes’ Son,” “The Lotus Eaters,” and “The Cyclops” from the online Moodle source by Thursday.