Tag Archives: carpe diem

1/29/2015 – B

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Today, we just worked on our Obituary in class. It was pretty much a shut up and work day.

It will be due tomorrow, and we’ll have a little time to work on it in class, and we’ll be doing a foldable with it as well.

Remember – if you get stuck, use the examples in the Blog of Death and the student examples in BB. You don’t have to live a crazy life in order to carpe diem – just think about the legacy that you want to leave.

Oh, and just in case you think obituaries have to to be serious in tone, here is the SELF-PENNED obit of a man who had FUN writing his obituary.

 

1/23/2015 – B

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I realized that even though I feel like we are behind, we are the *only* English IVB class in session right now, so we don’t have to keep up with any other class!

So, today, we reviewed To the Virgins to Make Much of Time – we ran out of time yesterday.

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.

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!

We read The Top Five Regrets of the Dying and talked about any regrets that we may *already* have.

And lastly, I gave you time to work on you BucketList. 🙂 Just copy/paste the URL into the discussion board so that other people can see your BucketList. What’s the point of the internet is you can’t share/network?

1/22/2015 – B

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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!

11/5/2014

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For those of you who are at the Texas Rain-assance Festival today, have fun! The assignment today was exempted for you. 🙂 If you want want to do it for extra credit, you can.

For everyone else, we worked on the collage.

Carefully select images which represent specific aspects of carpe diem. You can use pictures from internet, magazines, or even draw your own! You can also use symbols, colors, and patterns to depict the theme. Your images and illustrations need to show that you understand the themes

Yes, your poster needs to be attractive – presentation counts!

This is what I will be grading:

collage

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!

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!

4/17/14

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It’s the end of our carpe diem unit! Huzzah!

Yesterday, we did the six stations around the room, and today,w e are using tha tinformation to write a paper over carpe diem and YOLO. You can find instructions in BB in the Carpe Diem unit in the Dead Poet’s Society folder.

The big thing to remember is have a CLEAR THESIS and make sure that you are using the information from yesterday’s sessions – that was the WHOLE reason we did that – what’s the point of pre-writing if you don’t actually USE IT for your writing???

Have a great three day weekend and I’ll see you on Monday when we start our new unit! 🙂

4/4/14

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Gradespeed is finally up! Grades are currently being updated so look for a complete average on Monday during VV.

Last night, I took all of your post-it’s note and typed them up. I want you to cross out the items that would create regret when the person realized that death was not imminent.

regret

For example, if I wrote that I wanted to give away all of my money to charity, I probably would regret that once I realized that I was going to live. You aren’t judging – it’s not whether it’s GOOD or BAD – it’s about regret.

We then talked about the difference between YOLO and Carpe Diem and then we categorized tweet based on which hash tag we thought it should have. Any tweet that is CARPE DIEM is going to be BLUE and any YOLO tweet is RED.

hashtag1Each tweet is its own picture. Click the picture and then click Picture Tools (in pink).  You’ll get a whole bunch of options.

hashtag2This one is BLUE. So I’m going to go to RECOLOR and choose blue to change the color.

hashtag3See! Perfect!

Lastly, I briefly introduced our first major grade: The Obituary. We are in the CARPE DIEM unit and this is a great way to show not only that you understand carpe diem, but how you can apply this to your real life. That’s relevance! This is supposed to be an INSPIRING activity and it’s fairly easy – if you have goals. If you don’t have goals, it can be a bit difficult, so to assist with that, we are going to do a FUTURE TIMELINE.

Using the following resource, create a timeline of at least ten major events in your life AFTER graduation. I just want a title and a picture for each event. The more detailed you get here, the easier the major grade writing will be.

timeline saveIf you need to stop and save while you are in the middle, you can save the file where the x is, but that is ONLY for rough drafts. This is NOT what you will turn into me. You will click SAVE FINAL.

This will create a PDF file that you then turn into me. If you turn in anything other than a PDF, you’ll have to resubmit.

11/6/2013

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As of 1:29 today, all grades are accurate and updated. If you are missing something, turn it in. If there is a MISTAKE, explain it on a post-it note and leave it in the Parking Lot. You must submit these things in writing to me.

As we near the end of our Carpe Diem unit, we are going to watch Dead Poet’s Society. This movie will last today and tomorrow, so make sure you use your time wisely. If you are working on assignments, make sure that you read the summary from Wikipedia because there will be final exam questions over this movie.

The “Timed” test and the Obituary will both be due tomorrow. That means if you turn either of these things in Friday, there will be points deducted from your score (whatever you score out of 150 points). Remember, that’s going to be -5 points each day late. So if you earn 130 points and turn the paper in 2 days late, that will be -10 points for a final grade of 120 points. Easy? Easy.

Your grades should be updated and accurate in BB after today. While you guys are working (and the movie is playing), I am transferring grades from BB to Gradespeed since my computer does not work at home. IT is working on the issue, so I hope it will be resolved soon. 🙂