English 8 students finished up their summaries. We had to figure out a new way to turn them in since the Greenville County Schools tech department blocked the Moodle site (as well as this site — if you’re reading this from a student account at school, well, you won’t be reading it) for some as-yet undetermined reason. While this will be a major problem, I am hopeful that I will be able to get the site unblocked within a day or two.

English I Honors students finished up act two scene three, including Friar Lawrence’s long opening soliloquy:

The grey-eyed morn smiles on the frowning night,
Chequering the eastern clouds with streaks of light,
And flecked darkness like a drunkard reels
From forth day’s path and Titan’s fiery wheels:
Now, ere the sun advance his burning eye,
The day to cheer and night’s dank dew to dry,
I must up-fill this osier cage of ours
With baleful weeds and precious-juiced flowers.
The earth that’s nature’s mother is her tomb;
What is her burying grave that is her womb,
And from her womb children of divers kind
We sucking on her natural bosom find,
Many for many virtues excellent,
None but for some and yet all different.
O, mickle is the powerful grace that lies
In herbs, plants, stones, and their true qualities:
For nought so vile that on the earth doth live
But to the earth some special good doth give,
Nor aught so good but strain’d from that fair use
Revolts from true birth, stumbling on abuse:
Virtue itself turns vice, being misapplied;
And vice sometimes by action dignified.
Within the infant rind of this small flower
Poison hath residence and medicine power:
For this, being smelt, with that part cheers each part;
Being tasted, slays all senses with the heart.
Two such opposed kings encamp them still
In man as well as herbs, grace and rude will;
And where the worser is predominant,
Full soon the canker death eats up that plant.

We’ll be going through the rest of the act Monday.

Homework

• English 8 Studies: none.
• English I Honors: 
  • continue working on the text structures work on the Moodle site (should be available at home);
  • turn in your 2.2 and 2.3 tweets (use the Google Classroom form but also add it to the Moodle turn-in that I recently created);
  • seventh period students, make sure you write your summary of your group’s line on the forum I just created, and go back and read other groups’ summary before attempting the next assignment;
  • determine the meaning of the last four lines of the friar’s soliloquy;