Today in class we learned about meters. not the meter like a meter stick, but a meter in poem. meters in a poem are defined as, the pattern of stressed and unstressed syllables in a line. The stressed meter looks like this
/
this the unstressed looks like this
u
this. We then read Sonnet 18 by William Shakespeare. It was a love poem. That’s how we ended our day.
First and seventh periods went over act II scene 3. We looked in detail at the consequences of the theft. We’ll be finishing up the play tomorrow.
Second period completed the play today. We’re scheduled to start a new unit — on poetry — on Monday, with a small open-note, open-book test on the play Friday.
Fourth period finished up meter. Now students can explain with “iambic pentameter” means, as well as dactylic trimeter, anapestic dimeter, and other imaginary and real meters.
First period worked on iambic pentameter to increase their understanding of Shakespeare’s poetic writing.
Second period, quite bluntly, didn’t do the reading for today. This was confirmed, in class, by the quiz results. We did it in class, turning the quiz into study questions for another grade to offset the quiz grades.
Fourth period looked at verb tense consistency. There were lots of issues with verb tense consistency in their Charlie projects, so I decided to add a quick lesson to deal with that teachable moment.
Sixth period began the Shakespeare unit. We’ll likely be doing the verb tense consistency lesson later, for their projects have just been turned in.
Fourth and sixth: none.
Four classes, four different lessons.
First period began a unit on Shakespeare. We’ll be reading a condensed form of Much Ado About Nothing. We watched a film about Billy’s life and his use of language. Students returned to the topic of poetry briefly in order to learn what specifically blank verse is (unrhymed iambic pentameter).
Second period went over their Lord of the Flies/Antigone projects. We’ll have our first presentation tomorrow. We also looked at Kohlberg’s six stages of moral development during the last ten minutes of class. This will serve as a focal point for analyzing Pip’s actions and decisions.
Fourth period finished the debates. I took on one student in a one-on-one, free-for-all debate. I think he probably won.
Sixth period spent one last day in the library working on their Flowers for Algernon project.
