English 8 Strategies students worked today on sentence variety since it’s Wednesday (and we all know what Wednesday means: writer’s craft!), and both classes had an excellent session as we looked at complex sentences and how to form them.

I’d like especially to recognize our fifth period students who, when it was all said and done, had a mind-blowing behavior class grade of 96% positive. That means for every one negative class behavior, there were about twenty-five positive behaviors. I don’t know how we’ll ever beat that, but fifth period students assured me (and themselves) that we could have a repeat tomorrow.

English I Honors students looked at last night’s homework, “Do Not Go Gentle into that Good Night” by Dylan Thomas. Unlike other poems we’ve looked at while examining sound devices, we took the time to delve a little more deeply into the poem’s meaning before looking at the poem’s structure.

Afterward, we turned to Roethke’s “My Papa’s Waltz” as we wind up the first visit we have with sound devices.

The whiskey on your breath
Could make a small boy dizzy;
But I hung on like death:
Such waltzing was not easy.

We romped until the pans
Slid from the kitchen shelf;
My mother’s countenance
Could not unfrown itself.

The hand that held my wrist
Was battered on one knuckle;
At every step you missed
My right ear scraped a buckle.

You beat time on my head
With a palm caked hard by dirt,
Then waltzed me off to bed
Still clinging to your shirt.

We’ll be looking at it more closely tomorrow.

Homework

• English I Honors: reread “My Papa’s Waltz” paying close attention to two things: first, Roethke’s use of sound devices, especially meter and rhyme; second, the connotations of individual words in the poem and their effect on the rest of the poem.