Monthly Archives: October 2014

10/31/2014

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We started out today with the most appropriate picture: Death and the Devil Surprising Two Maidens.

Death and the Devil Surprising Two Women

Then, we read Grandma Betty’s Obituary from the Blog of Death. What an amazing woman! Seriously, this is the legacy that I’d like to leave when I die! I love Grandma Betty!

Then, we looked at the Blog of Death in a little more detail. I skimmed through and showed you a few people that were of interest to me, and I showed you how to use the categories, even though I wish there was a place to actually see all of the categories!

The point of that was that we are searching for really good sentences that we can use as models or mentors when we start writing our major grade next week.

Mentor SentencesYou have to find FIVE great opening lines. That is the opening line(s) of an obituary, not the paragraph. You have to find five great endings for an obit, and you’ll need to find five good general lines from anywhere in an obituary.

DO NOT JUST CHOOSE THE FIRST FIVE OBITS THAT YOU FIND AND CHOOSE THREE LINES FROM EACH. That is not the point of this, and it won’t help you write your paper next week. Seriously. This is NOT busy work, so if you get done in five minutes, that’s a sign to me that you just chose random sentences without thought.

Then, if you have time, start the Future Timeline.

FT1

So, you’ll start out here. All you need to do here is add your name and the title Future Timeline. and then hit start.

FT2Here, you’ll add your first item. Click on the timeline to see this screen. All you need focus on are the label and the picture. Don’t worry about adding the short or the long description – this is just a pre-writing activity for ideas. You’ll do the writing about it next week.

FT3

When you are done, it should look something like this, except yours will be real items. 🙂FT4

If you have to quit BEFORE you are done, you’ll hit SAVE at the top and save it as a RWT file. This is a rough draft. You can’t turn this in.FT5

When you are done, you’ll hit finish and see this screen. Then, you’ll hit SAVE FINAL.

FT6Save this as a PDF and turn this bad boy in.

10/30/2014

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Today was a pretty interesting day that showed a great amount of maturity in my students. I honestly was really impressed with the comments that people made.

First, we printed the lyrics to Marvin Gaye’s “Let’s Get in On”, listened to the song, and highlighted persuasive language in BLUE and highlighted references to TIME in yellow. Answer the three questions and drop off your highlighted lyrics (if you were absent so I can give you credit for highlighting along with the three questions).

Let's Get It On

We talked about the speaker and his audience (a girl) and analyzed that relationship. We highlighted evidence of carpe diem (time) in the poem, highlighted IRONY in the song, and highlighted references to LOVE in the song. We also specifically talked about how the song was contradictory and how it related to TIME (“stop beating ’round the bush”, and “this minute”).

We talked about consent, and how the audience in the song has obviously NOT given consent.

Students then sat there puzzled as to why we listened to that song, so we read “To His Coy Mistress” to explain. It’s the original “Let’s Get It On”, just much creepier.

You can download my notes in a Word document so you don’t have to copy notes. Just save it wherever you save my stuff.

Coy Mistress Coy Mistress2

Lastly, we did the Syllogism Pyramid foldable. You can find the template in LMS.

For each triangle, create a text box and write the following:

  • If… (1st stanza – lines 1-20) + image
  • But… (2nd stanza – lines 21-32) + image
  • So… (3rd stanza – lines 33-46) + image

You will need to ROTATE the text box. Grab the little green ball and turn it. Make sure that the text box faces the hypotenuse. Don’t worry about the text that is already on the pyramid – that will be hidden when you fold it up.

We finished up the day with some extra time to finish the To the Virgins Discussion Board! Hooray!

10/29/14

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In the Carpe Diem section, click on the Seize the Day folder. Read the story for Lingerie and follow the directions. Pretty easy. All you have to do is find ONE WORD. That’s IT!

We watched Mr. Keating creep his students out in a clip From Dead Poets Society and then we did the Carpe Diem Translation Tower.

You will read the four sentences, and then translate each sentence in your own thought. Add some clip art. Riley explained what it mean to strain the wine by showing a snippet from a video about pruno. She also serenaded the class to Doris Day’s song Que Sera Sera.

Make sure you have clip art! You may need to resize the font. Then cut thusly:

And then fold/glue.

In To The Virgins Discussion Board, we answered the required question: What Age is Best in Life” before we printed “To the Virgins” and “Coy Mistress” to OneNote.

We then read To The Virgins, To Make Much of Time. Make sure that you get the notes here:

If you want, ask me why I find this poem so offensive.

We also talked about peaking in high school. If you peak in high school, then the rest of your life will be pretty depressing.

Lastly, we went back to the To The Virgins Discussion board to answer three more questions. YOUR CHOICE. Make sure you that you have four completed so you can get full credit. If you do MORE than four questions, you are earn extra points!

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Today was a pretty each day – you even had some time to finish your Deep Questions from yesterday if you haven’t gotten those done yet.

We started talking about which we’d rather: knowing WHEN we would die or knowing HOW we’d die – without any ability to change future events.

Then, we talked about grades – I’ll just post the slides that I put up.Slide4 Slide5 Slide6 Slide7 Slide8 Slide9 Slide10 Slide11Next, we watched two videos by the guys who did The Buried Life on MTV. This one is the trailer for their tv show, and this is a really deep TED Talk that the four guys gave in Rome.

We talked about the difference between a MEANINGFUL item and a COOL item – choose items that are meaningful to you. Here’s MY Bucket List!

http://bucketlist.org/list/lochnessa/

Create your own account, create your OWN BucketList, and then copy/paste the web address to the Discussion board by creating a new thread.

I’ll be grading this on having a AT LEAST ten meaningful items. Try to think of things that YOU want to do before you start borrowing from other people.

10/27/2014

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Ahoy! The Captain is back from being quarantined for the last few weeks! No worries, I am ebola-free, so you can’t blame me if you get sick.

Today (Monday) marks the first day of a new term, a term in which you can exempt my final exam in January.

exemptionFirst block, pay particular attention to the fact that tardies for Vistas Visits count against you for block 1. Jayla and Jessica! I want the entire class to be exempt! If you mess that up because of attendance, I will write the hardest finale ever in the history of Vistas!

So. Back to what we did on Monday.

We did a group activity called Creative Coloring and then wrote a response to it. If you weren’t here, go to First Day activities and then Creative Coloring Response and the answer the questions as best as you can about group work in general, focusing on how attendance affects group work, maybe even giving a personal anecdote (story) about how you have been personally affected by it in class.

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We jumped over to out first unit: Carpe Diem. We read the Top Five Regrets of the Dying and talked about hospice care and which regret you thought was the most meaningful.

Then, we watched the trailer for The Bucket List and I cried.

Tomorrow, we will be writing our OWN bucket lists, and I mentioned the most common item on my students’ lists is skydiving. So then I impressed everyone with this video – make sure you check out the super cool helmet (?) that I’m wearing and how goofy I look when I am actually jumping out of the plane.

Then, we answered the Deep Questions. I”ll be looking at your DEEP thoughts about this rather than complete sentences, so focus on that. This should take some time to complete, so if you get done in three minutes, you probably didn’t do it correctly.

See you tomorrow and be ready to start writing your very own BucketList!