First and fourth periods continued with their paraphrases of excerpts of Joseph Campbell’s The Hero with a Thousand Faces. It’s a challenge, for passages read like this:

Refusal of the summons converts the adventure into its negative. Walled in boredom, hard work, or “culture,” the subject loses the power of significant affirmative action and becomes a victim to be saved. His flowering world becomes a wasteland of dry stones and his life feels meaningless — even though, like King Minos, he may through titanic effort succeed in building an empire or renown. Whatever house he builds, it will be a house of death: a labyrinth of cyclopean walls to hide from him his Minotaur. All he can do is create new problems for himself and await the gradual approach of his disintegration (59).

We’ll be completing the paraphrases tomorrow and working on their ordering probably Friday.

Second and seventh periods completed the short grammar review we began. We began with a short quiz, then went over the Cornell notes from yesterday. (A copy of them is available here.) They will have extra practice during class Friday, working on apostrophes, commas, and commonly confused words.

Example sentences with interrupters that we worked on in class are:

1. Estefan, badly injured in a bus accident in 1990, made a remarkable comeback the following year.
2. Estefan, who was born in Cuba, came to the United States when she was two years old.
3. The album, released to mark her successful comeback, is titled Into the Light.
4. Appropriately that song, inspired by a fragment that Emilio wrote as Gloria was being taken to surgery, is titled “Coming out of the Dark.”

All classes also spent time today working on PASS writing practice. We went over students’ practice topic essay preparation, and then I explained how to use the question prompt as a means of creating a thesis statement. Closing the class, I modeled how I would have prepared the topic.

Thesis: My favorite memory is the last time I went to Marble Slab with my grandpa.
TS: He was sick and I knew it would be our last time.
CD: His illness
CM: How I felt
CD: Insisted on one last trip
CM: How the family felt

I threw in an extra-cheesy sentence for seventh period:

Thesis: My favorite memory is of a walk my wife and I took on the beach the night before we were married.
TS: Everything about that night made it romantic.
CD: Full moon
CM: Gentle light on face
CD: The rhythm of the sparkling waves were a promise of the coming eternal rhythm my wife and I would share in our life together.

In both cases, the “memory” I shared was a complete fabrication, an effort to show students that in the PASS test, one can take a certain amount of creative license.

Homework

• English I Honors: 
  • complete the Odyssey by Friday;
  • re-work the PASS practice essay as necessary, adding a thesis statement and reorganizing the other components as needed (by Monday).