Category Archives: Uncategorized

9/7/17 (Level)

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Today, we are studying the history of the Anglo-Saxon Dark Ages to prepare for reading Beowulf.

Instead of giving you the textbook to read from, I gave you pictures that I drew. I explained what each picture meant, sometimes jumping on tables and acting things out. This is what I mean when I talk about The Riley Show – sure, you can still laugh at my pictures if you missed today, but you missed the SHOW. And sometimes, The Riley Show is what helps you remember things. I think a few people took videos, but I can’t promise that they didn’t delete them: I honestly don’t think they needed the video since they LEARNED the material – gasp!

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After I taught my pictures, I had YOU explain what each picture meant. You could do it from memory, with a buddy, or even use the textbook if you’d like – that IS where I got the information from.

I think when we take the quiz over this next week, I’ll let you use my pictures to hopefully help jog your memory. 😉

9/7/17 (AP)

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Remember when we did the #’s activity the first week of school? You know, the one where we had a minute to circle a bunch of numbers? Yeah. THAT one! I want you to think about that for the assignment today.

We are taking a 55 question MC AP Literature test today. Don’t worry, it’s not a major grade. Think of it as a diagnostic tool. I’m not taking a major grade over it: I haven’t taught you any literary analysis yet, so it wouldn’t be fair if I graded over it!

I want you to do your best to give me an accurate and honest assessment of your ability with this test. Don’t get help. Don’t look up vocabulary. And if you DO, grade yourself on your original or “gut instinct” answer rather than the modified or correct one.

This should be low-stress at this point. This activity will not mess up your GPA.

I simply want to see where you guys are so I can help you.

9/6/17 (AP)

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Welcome back! I’m seriously glad to see so many of you! A few housekeeping notes:

You need your texts (How to Read Literature Like a Professor, Othello, and Pygmalion) by Monday.

We started out today by finding a unique college essay and posting the prompt on the hallway window. Yes, some were basic, but what we noticed was that the more competitive the college, the more essays you had to write and the more creative the essays got (University of Chicago!!!!).

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Then, we talked about the rubric for the college essay. I am not giving you one: YOU guys are creating it! Well, actually, you will be giving me suggestions for it based on Harvard Admissions board comments, and I’ll be putting the rubric together for you. 😉 I warned you guys – I’m a non-traditional teacher!

Your College Essay rough draft will be due on Wednesday, 9/13 at the beginning of class. You can use any prompt you’d like (and even branch out to scholarship essays if you’d like), but I will need to know the prompt when you turn it in. 😉

We spent the rest of the time today on Writing Territories: you can just list your answers if you’d like. This is not only a getting to know you activity, but we can pull this out and use it for ideas later on in the year. Anything that you do, I do myself, so if you want to see my answers, here they are!

 

8/24/17 (Level)

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Today, we looked at the Apply Texas essay prompts.

We’ll be addressing Topic A, so the prewriting we are doing today is specifically for that topic. Notice the topic says “Describe your family, home, neighborhood, or community, and explain how it has shaped you as a person.” What does that mean? Well, it means don’t write about all of those things! It’s better to focus on one narrow topic rather than four broad ones. So, to help us decide what we want to focus on, we are going to fill out the prewriting chart.

As always, if I ask you to do something, I do it myself. Here is my example prewriting. But don’t get worried that mine is so long: I’m OLD! I probably have a lot more experience than you. You can also see that that I was able to spend a LOT of time in certain areas, and then didn’t have much to say in other areas. That’s okay. That should show you that you probably should AVOID writing about that topic!

This will be due tomorrow: we’ll have all day to work on this today, and tomorrow, we’ll have the day to finish the Writing Territories and this, the Apply Texas Prewriting.

8/24/17 (AP)

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I’m going to go boring on your today and read notes off a PowerPoint! Hooray! These are the notes from the Harvard book that I’ve been referencing.

Choose a college entrance essay prompt (from Apply Texas or elsewhere) and write to that topic. Aim for about 500 words, unless the prompt asks for something else.

I know some of you (my grade grabbers!) want to to go STRAIGHT to the rubric to see how to get an A! Well, cool your jets for a second. We are going to create our OWN rubric tomorrow based on what we talked about today. All the AP classes are going to make suggestions, and Mrs. James and I will flesh it out for you.

8/23/17 (Level)

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Ahoy! Because I am old and I miss MySpace, we are going to do a MySpace survey style quiz/questionnaire. Why? First of all, it helps me to get to know you, but it also provides areas of expertise that you can write about for later writing assignments. 🙂

As I promised, anything that I ask you to do, I do myself. So here is MY list you can look it. Notice that I don’t always go into details on this. I’ve given intentionally vague answers in some areas – for a reason. You can do the same! I want to get to know you, but I don’t need to know ALL your dirty secrets. This way, you can still maintain some privacy while allowing me to (hopefully) make connections.

We will work on this all day today and will be due on Friday, 8/25 (revised due date: 9/6).

8/23/17 (AP)

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Today, we looked at successful Harvard application essays. Each table read one essay and as a group, discussed and identified the following:

  1. A summary of the essay
  2. A thematic statement of the essay
  3. Accomplishments of the essay
  4. Areas of the improvement for the essay
  5. Ideas I could use/incorporate in my own writing

At the end of class, each table presented their findings to the class. A few people were surprised that these were successful Harvard essays – hopefully, that will ease the pressure on YOU a bit. A college application essay is designed to show your personality and your values – they look at your GPA, transcript, and test scores to determine your intelligence.

8/22/17 (Level)

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Glad you are back!

We discussed our Creative Coloring activity from yesterday based on these questions:

1. Was this a difficult task for the group? Why or why not? What would have made this easier as a group?

2. How did the group work to create the picture? Who was the leader? Who didn’t work very hard? Who was a helper (or made suggestions)? Who just walked away and did nothing? Who decided the theme? How or why was that theme chosen? Did you practice or trace the pictures? Did everyone listen? Did everyone participate? How well did YOU participate?

3. Is everyone happy with the picture that was created? What would you have done differently if you were working all by yourself? Is there anything you would change?

4. Is it easier to do things by yourself or with a group? Was the group too big or too small? Or just right?

5. Why is it important to be able to work with other as a member of a team?

Honestly, after ten years of doing this, I thought I’d seen and heard it all possible responses to these questions, but you guys gave some great insight.

Then we looked at our finished word cloud from yesterday to remember our focus for the year:

Honestly, I had to look up absquatulate. Good word. I like it when my students stump me! 🙂

Lastly, we discussed my ten Purpose Driven words that I believe in:

KEYS OF PURPOSE-DRIVEN LEARNING

 

KEY DEFINITION EXPECTATIONS LEADERS
ENTHUSIASM A strong and inspiring

feeling of excitement

 Smile!, Sit up and actively listen, Participate, Have fun Jimmy Fallon

Peyton Manning

Oprah
EFFORT Hard work; a serious attempt

at accomplishing a goal

 Turn in quality work that shows that you tried your hardest, Overcome obstacles that arise Jackie Joyner-Kersee

Jane Goodall

Lionel Messi
CONFIDENCE Faith or belief in one’s self;

certainty in one’s abilities

 Speak loudly and clearly,

Make eye contact, Embrace challenges

 Martin Luther King Jr.

Amelia Earhart

Muhammad Ali
FOCUS Concentrated attention

on the task at hand

 Keep working for the whole time, Ignore distractions, Do what needs to get done Rosa Parks

Billie Jean King

Michelangelo
RESILIENCE Capability to recover quickly from difficulties; toughness Accept that mistakes will be made, Ask yourself what can be done differently, Keep trying Michael Jordan

Abraham Lincoln

Helen Keller
DEPENDABILITY Trustworthy; able to be relied

on to do what is expected

 Always do what you say you’re going to do, Be an active participant of your group Nelson Mandela

Aaron Rodgers

Mother Teresa
INITIATIVE Power to act or take charge before others do Volunteer, Meet the expectations without having to be asked, Lead others to make strong choices Wright Brothers

Bill Gates

Jackie Robinson
CREATIVITY Use of imagination

and original ideas

 Be an individual, Purposely be different, Brainstorm a variety of ideas before deciding on one Steve Jobs

Franklin D. Roosevelt

Beyonce
CURIOSITY Strong desire to know or learn something; inquisitiveness Look for the answer before asking for help, Dive deeper into a class topic, Ask “why?” Thomas Edison

Marie Curie

Neil Armstrong
EMPATHY Ability to understand and share the feelings of another person Put others first, Think about how your actions affect others, Be respectful of everyone Gandhi

Florence Nightingale

Harriet Tubman

We ended by grading ourselves on these areas: A, B, C, D, and F. I also asked you to tell me what is one thing that you are concerned about for this year.

See you tomorrow for an old skool MySpace survey! 😉

 

8/22/17 (AP)

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I reminded you that we needed How To Read Literature Like a Professor, Othello (yes, you can get No Fear if you’d like), and Pygmalion. We have class sets of Othello and Pygmalion if you’d like, but if you are like me, you are going to want to annotate and analyze in the book.

Get these books ASAP: Othello and Pygmalion will need to be read by 10/2. We will start reading segments of HTRLLAP in September.

We discussed our Creative Coloring activity from yesterday based on these questions:

1. Was this a difficult task for the group? Why or why not? What would have made this easier as a group?

2. How did the group work to create the picture? Who was the leader? Who didn’t work very hard? Who was a helper (or made suggestions)? Who just walked away and did nothing? Who decided the theme? How or why was that theme chosen? Did you practice or trace the pictures? Did everyone listen? Did everyone participate? How well did YOU participate?

3. Is everyone happy with the picture that was created? What would you have done differently if you were working all by yourself? Is there anything you would change?

4. Is it easier to do things by yourself or with a group? Was the group too big or too small? Or just right?

5. Why is it important to be able to work with other as a member of a team?

Honestly, after ten years of doing this, I thought I’d seen and heard it all possible responses to these questions, but you guys gave some great insight.

Then we looked at our finished word cloud from yesterday to remember our focus for the year:

Honestly, I had to look up absquatulate. Good word. I like it when my students stump me! 🙂

We then played Two Rooms and Boom. Once you got past the initial shock of it all (and I tried to explain the game as quickly as possible), you guys did fairly well. We haven’t had time to debrief from my 4th period, but in 2nd period, the blue team won. We also had a few independent gray cards win, too. 4th period: you guys need to learn how to secretly do some card shares! You were flashing everyone your colors and cards! I won’t be surprised if we regroup tomorrow and we don’t have a single winner!

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I want you to remember this experience as you read Othello. You might be able to talk me into another now that you know how the game is played. 😉

Tomorrow, we’ll be working with personal essays (college entrance essays or scholarship essays).