English 8 students began their new schedule today:

• Monday will be for covering a specific writing genre (argument first period).
• Tuesday will be for writing and conferencing.
• Wednesday will be for craft, focusing first period on sentence variety.
• Thursday will cover grammar.
• Friday will be a second writing/conferencing day or a makeup day if scheduling conflicts arise.

Today we began looking at the elements of the argument.

A PDF of the above document is available here.

After covering the first three elements, which should be review from last year, we looked at a picture mystery in order to determine claims, evidence, and reasons for what happened in the image:

First period’s notes

Fifth period’s notes

English I Honors students continued looking at how to analyze literature and apply the Schaffer model to real-life writing. We continued with “In the Family” and the question of the untrustworthy narrator. I concluded by pointing out that while it seems the narrator is mentally ill and therefore not entirely trustworthy, it’s also an example of magical realism, which blurs the lines between reality and “magic,” which exists in the genre without the quotes.

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Students worked in groups to determine whether or not the narrator is mentally ill (i.e., they looked for textual proof).

Homework

• English I Honors: 
  • prepare for a discussion about why the point of view of “In the Family” must be in first person in order to work;
  • read “The Cask Amontillado” for tomorrow (download here).