English 8 Strategies students had a discussion in the form of a Socratic seminar about topics related to our final project for the quarter, analytic paragraphs about the selections they are reading in literature class.

For Flowers for Algernon, discussion questions were:

1. Our relationships with other people are more important than our achievements.
2. It is better to accept your fate than to try to change it. (“Fate” means destiny.)
3. It is important to have empathy for others. (“Empathy” means more than sympathy: it means not just feeling sorry for someone but feeling the same thing with someone.)
4. Sometimes, it’s better to remain ignorant about certain things. (“Ignorant” doesn’t mean stupid; it just means you don’t know something.)

For The Outsiders, discussion questions were:

1. We can often misunderstand people for a very long time, and when we find out the truth, it can be too late.
2. Sometimes, people’s lives aren’t what they seem. People who seem happy and liked are in fact miserable.
3. Some people are so bad that they cannot be saved. There are people who are “past the point of return” and can not be turned into good people.
4. Sometimes when people are abused, they come to see it as normal. For them, it’s almost not abuse any more but it’s simply “how things are.”

Fifth period conducting their Socratic seminar

English I Honors students finished up tone by looking at the lyric moment of a poem and how it relates to the tonal shift. We noticed three things:

1. It’s the “ah-ha!” moment of the poem, when we see what it’s truly about.
2. It often accompanies the tonal shift.
3. It appears toward the end of the poem.

We also went over the final project for the poetry unit, which is a recitation and analysis oral project. Details, examples, and a rubric is available at the Moodle site.

Creative writing students, after a mini-lesson on how we will be editing each others’ work in Google Drive, continued with existing projects.

Homework

• English I Honors: using the Poetry Foundation’s web site, find a poem of between fifteen and twenty-five lines for the poetry project.