Today we looked at a couple of famous passages in 1.5. The first is the torches passage: There is a lot happening in that passage, including the introduction of the primary motif in the play: light...
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What our classroom did in previous days, weeks, months, even years…
“I can infer from the text the action in the scene.”
Students spent the morning going over the LEAP test for the state education department, so we were on a testing schedule that gave students a little over half an hour in each class. In the limited...
Queen Mab
Today we began with a look at a critical line from 1.3: Students were to identify the speaker solely from the passage and its context clues. One clue is in the first line, the inverted...
Wordy Nurse
Today we looked at the nurse and her opening monologue: Even or odd, of all days in the year, Come Lammas-eve at night shall she be fourteen. Susan and she--God rest all Christian souls!-- Were of...
Capulet the Revolutionary Father
Today we finished up 1.1 by reviewing some famously oxymoronic lines from Romeo: Alas, that love, whose view is muffled still, Should, without eyes, see pathways to his will! Where shall we dine? O...
Parsing Shakespeare with Participles
Today we started with participial phrases since the next section of the sonnet which we are working with includes a fair number of participles: Afterward, we
Starting the Bard
Students started the final series of poems in our poetry unit, turning to the poems of William Shakespeare in preparation for the next unit, which is on Romeo and Juliet. We began parsing...
Tenor and Vehicle
We began by looking at the first question for the new article of the week. Early in the piece, there is a challenging sentence that we went over: I have become consumed with an alarming possibility:...
Tonal Shift: “The Lanyard”
We went over "The Lanyard" today, beginning with Collins reading the poem at a poetry festival. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=khQ9e0QpEM8 Students were surprised to hear the audience laughing at...
Tone Continued: “The Lanyard”
Today we continued working with tone, and we stuck with Billy Collins's work, reading "The Lanyard" today. We began by building a little background knowledge about Proust's madeleine: That...
Tone 3: Finishing “Forgetfulness”
Today, we went over a new poem: Billy Collins's "Forgetfulness." The name of the author is the first to go followed obediently by the title, the plot, the heartbreaking conclusion, the entire novel...
Tone 2: Forgetfulness
We finished up looking at tone in "My Papa's Waltz," determining that there was a somewhat-nostalgically playful tone in the poem. Afterward, students worked on Billy Collin's poem "Forgetfulness."...
