Tag Archives: carpe diem

4/6/2016

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The Big Grade: our first major writing grade!

Today, we started out by talking about obituaries in general. They are the written notices of death that usually include a brief biography of the person. Then we read the poem The Dash by Linda Ellis and talked about that poem supports this quote from the Blog of Death:

Some people view obituaries as morbid stories, but in truth only one line of an obit deals with death. The rest of the story focuses on the amazing lives people lead.

We also read the obituary that I wrote that I’ve been writing for the past ten years. Honestly, it has inspired me. Every time I read it, it’s a reminder of what I want to do. While you guys are finishing writing this tomorrow, I’ll be editing my own – I need to add my children! <3

We are going to write our OWN obituary in class. You need to focus on CARPE DIEM – how did you make your life extraordinary? You will need to be at least 75 years old (or older) – it’s hard to carpe diem a life when it’s short. Think about the Bucket List pre-writing and the Bucket List that we did this week – use those to find your focus. Is it family? Is it being successful? Is it helping other people? Use that focus to help you figure out details and events to your life.

Under Carpe Diem: Obituary, you can find instructions and examples, one of which being my own. Yes, I do every assignment that I ask you to do. The reason that I do this is so that I can share things that helped me when I did the assignment. The thing that helped ME the most when I wrote my obit was the Blog of Death. Seriously. I used it not for ideas, but for sentence structures and modeling. Use your Sentence Models that we did on Tuesday for help and inspiration!

For example, here is the first sentence of Demetius Newton’s obituary:

Rep. Demetrius C. Newton dedicated his life to improving the human condition, first as a civil rights attorney and later as a politician and public servant.

It’s a great sentence, but obviously, I’m not a civil rights attorney, politician, or a public servant. But it’s a great sentence.

So what I would do is this: I’d take out the specific information and leave blanks.

_____ dedicated her life to improving ____________, first as a ________ and later as a __________.

Now that it’s not specific, I can add in my own information.

Vanessa Riley dedicated her life to educating others, first as a teacher and later as the director of the at-risk high school that she founded.

If you look in BB, you can see the rubric that will be used to grade the obituary. You need to have a minimum of 500 words.

1/8/2015 – B

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I sent everyone a PowerPoint about Carpe Diem, Eat, Drink, and Be Merry, Memento Mori, and YOLO today. We translated the passage from Horace (where we get the expression carpe diem from). You can use this on the final exam if you still have it in ten weeks.

The last page of the PowerPoint is a foldable. You will read the four sentences, and then translate each sentence in your own thought. Add some clip art. I explained what it mean to strain the wine by showing a snippet from a video about pruno. I also serenaded the class to Doris Day’s song Que Sera Sera. Apparently, the entire school heard my song to you.

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

And then fold/glue.

Afterwards, we created an account on Bucket List. I won’t be able to access your account information, so remember your username and password, please!

Here is my account that you can look at. You can see that I have goals that I want to do, and things that I have done.

I want you to create a bucket list of things that YOU want to do before you die. Focus on meaningful things that you want to do, not just cool things. I know, it’s hard NOT to put those cool things on your list when you see them, but just think about things that you’d regret if you didn’t do them.

I’m looking for ten cool things and ten meaningful things for a total list of 20 items.

 

10/26/2015

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We started today talking about Death and the Devil Surprising Two Maidens. If you weren’t here today, there is a drop box assignment for this in the Carpe Diem folder in Obituary.

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 Sentences

You 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.

If you want extra credit, if you find a really interesting Obit, put the person’s name in the last column so I can share it with other students. :)

I also have a list of the people that I find fascinating if you are getting stuck stuck looking people. As of right now, it’s not in Blackboard, so let me know if you need it. :)

10/20/2015

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We totally ran out of time for all of the super awesome cool things we were supposed to do yesterday! In case you didn’t do it yet, here is the link for YESTERDAY’S exit ticket!

Firstly, if you needed your gmail password reset, I had those for you so you could send me the 48 Hours e-mail.

I also gave out my password for Remind.

Remind_IVB (1)

We read through Carpe Diem Translation PowerPoint and talked about carpe diem, memento mori, eat, drink, and be merry, and YOLO.

The next assignment we did was the Tower Translation. You will read the four sentences, and then translate each sentence in your own thought. Add some clip art. I explained what it mean to strain the wine by showing a snippet from a video about pruno. I also serenaded the class to Doris Day’s song Que Sera Sera. Supposedly there are videos out there. If you have them, post a link below in the comment section!

MAKE SURE YOU ONLY PRINT THE VERY LAST SLIDE!

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

And then fold/glue.

We then answered the following Exit Ticket question and worked on our Bucket Lists.

 

9/8/15 – B

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The Big Grade: our first major writing grade!

Today, we started out by talking about obituaries in general. They are the written notices of death that usually include a brief biography of the person. Then we read the poem The Dash by Linda Ellis and talked about that poem supports this quote from the Blog of Death:

Some people view obituaries as morbid stories, but in truth only one line of an obit deals with death. The rest of the story focuses on the amazing lives people lead.

We are going to write our OWN obituary in class. You need to focus on CARPE DIEM – how did you make your life extraordinary? You will need to be at least 75 years old (or older) – it’s hard to carpe diem a life when it’s short. Think about the Bucket List pre-writing and the Bucket List that we did this week – use those to find your focus. Is it family? Is it being successful? Is it helping other people? Use that focus to help you figure out details and events to your life.

Under Carpe Diem: Obituary, you can find instructions and examples, one of which being my own. Yes, I do every assignment that I ask you to do. The reason that I do this is so that I can share things that helped me when I did the assignment. The thing that helped ME the most when I wrote my obit was the Blog of Death. Seriously. I used it not for ideas, but for sentence structures and modeling. Use your Sentence Models that we did on Tuesday for help and inspiration!

For example, here is the first sentence of Demetius Newton’s obituary:

Rep. Demetrius C. Newton dedicated his life to improving the human condition, first as a civil rights attorney and later as a politician and public servant.

It’s a great sentence, but obviously, I’m not a civil rights attorney, politician, or a public servant. But it’s a great sentence.

So what I would do is this: I’d take out the specific information and leave blanks.

_____ dedicated her life to improving ____________, first as a ________ and later as a __________.

Now that it’s not specific, I can add in my own information.

Vanessa Riley dedicated her life to educating other, first as a teacher and later as the director of the at-risk high school that she founded.

If you look in BB, you can see the rubric that will be used to grade the obituary. You need to have a minimum of 500 words.

9/2/15 – B

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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 were really puzzled about the lyrics, especially the phrase “threatin’ you, baby”, so I did a little research. First, I wanted to make sure that I got the lyrics right, and it seems I did. So then, I went to Wikipedia and read this little tidbit. It seems Mr. Gaye had a troubled childhood and used his music to work through some of his issues. The power of poetry!

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 MistressCoy Mistress2I showed you eagles twirling and how that fit into the poem.

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.

8/24/2015 – B

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Ahoy, mateys! Welcome to the first day of school! I *told* you that I didn’t like my desks were arranged yesterday. To be honest, I’m STILL not sure if I like them. If anyone want to hep me rearrange things when I get back, I’ll be more than happy to move things around again when I get back.

Everything we did today can be located in BB.

BBIVAFirst, we talked about how I’m on a points system rather than percentage system. I find this easier to set and meet your goals for the term.  The most points you can earn for the term is 1500 points. That means that if you have 1500 points at the end of the term, you will have earned 100%. 1500/1500 = 100% If you earn 1300/1500 points, you’ll have earned a 90, 1200/1500 points earns an 80, 1100 points is a 73, and 1050 points is a 70. 

This helps you know just how much work you need to do in order to earn your grade goal. If you want to pass and you only have 1000 points, you know you are only fifty points away from passing. That might be one assignment (depending on what you are missing).

In order to give you a visualize, I have created a chart with levels:

levels

As you progress, I’ll “level” you up, just like in a game.

LevelsThen, we talked about how I use rubrics for major grades and what I expect from the different grade levels of work.

 

 

 

 

We discussed a little bit that I take -5 off major assignments for every day late.

Then, we signed up for my Remind class. You can find my code in BB under the First Day folder.

Since we had some extra time, I talked about how I won’t be here the rest of the week. I briefly explained the assignments that I’m leaving. We talked about the Bucket List and I promised that I’d leave the first part of the Carpe Diem Tower Translation foldable here, so here it is!

tower

I’ll try to Skype at least once this week, but I can’t make any promises.

<3

2/9/2015 – B

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Since we finished watching The Bucket List last week, we started pre-writing for our essay tomorrow. Basically, what I did was rewrite the pre-writing that I had for Term 2 – It wasn’t effective, and I don’t like giving out work that doesn’t HELP you, ya’ know?

So, this is a new pre-writing activity. I honestly don’t know how long it will take you guys. You’ll notice that Section 6 is messed up – just skip that one for now. I obviously got distracted and my brain skipped a beat while writing.

Hopefully, this will help you write the actual essay tomorrow!

Shout out to Louis, who got his first tattoo(s) on Friday after our conversation about tattoos in class! Carpe inkum! Gosh, my class is so relevant. 😉