Poetry Out Loud - Days 3 & 4

On Wednesday (1st) / Thursday (6th and 8th) we spent most of the day practicing reading our poems out loud in pairs, rotating through different partners.
We used two different methods of feedback: Pointing (identifying key words / phrases) and Sayback (what you hear the poem saying).

On Thursday (1st) / Friday (6th and 8th) we focused on some different ways of reciting our poems.

Here are links to the video examples I showed in class:

If you are looking for some tips on reciting your poem, and wondering how it will be scored, here is a description of that from the Poetry Out Loud website:

• Tips on Reciting / Scoring

Poetry Out Loud - Day Two

For those of you who submitted your three poem choices to me yesterday, thank you!

• Here is a link to the list of the poems you will present

For those of you who have not yet submitted your choices to me, you must do that immediately so we can move ahead.

Poetry Out Loud - Second Semester Seniors!!

Greetings! Welcome back!
After a busy week of finals you hopefully had a fun and relaxing weekend with no school work.
Now it's time to reload for your last lap - the final few months of school (just 4 left!) - your last semester of high school - second semester of senior year. Woohoo!

We'll gat a chance to talk about your finals and grades a bit today while you are taking the first steps towards a project for the next week - Poetry Out Loud.

Perhaps you've done this with another class, and maybe not. Basically you are going to choose a poem, memorize it, figure out a great way to present it to the class, and then share it as part of a class competition. Our winner will go on to the school-wide level, where the winner and runner-up will move on to the regional level. In recent years DHS students have reached the state level and even came in second place!

Why memorize and recite poems? 

• Poetry offers mastery of language, and stocks the mind with images and ideas in unforgettable words and phrases 
• Poetry trains and develops our emotional intelligence 
• Poetry reminds us that language is holistic—that how something is said is part of what is being said, with the literal meaning of words only part of their whole meaning, which is also carried by tone of voice, inflection, rhythm 
• Poetry lets us see the world through other eyes, and equips us imaginatively and spiritually to face the joys and challenges of our lives.

Let's get started! Here's the plan for today:

1. Go here: http://www.poetryoutloud.org/poems-and-performance/
2. You're going to be browsing through poems and selecting three you might want to memorize and perform. Be sure you are happy with all three - I'll ultimately be choosing which one you'll work with for this project.
3. Where to start? Read through this list of tips for how to choose a poem. 
4. By the end of the period you need to create a Google doc and share it with me. It in, you need to list the three poems you'd be interested in using. For each one, please provide a sentence or two about why it is interesting to you.

We'll talk more about the rest of it tomorrow!

First Semester Final

To help you with your work for the final, here are some resources:

• What are explications?
• Explication rubric
• Some Rhetorical and Literary devices

• Write about literature using the present tense

• First Semester Final

Things Fall Apart - W.B. Yeats poem

Here is the full version of "The Second Coming" by W.B. Yeats - four lines from it are included in your book before the start of the story. Why was this used by Achebe? What questions does this raise? What layers of meaning does it add?

"The Second Coming"

Turning and turning in the widening gyre1
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the center cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.

Surely some revelation is at hand;
Surely the Second Coming 2 is at hand;
The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out
When a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi3
Troubles my sight: somewhere in sands of the desert
A shape with lion body and the head of a man,
A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,
Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it
Reel shadows of the indignant desert birds.
The darkness drops again; but now I know
That twenty centuries 4 of stony sleep
Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,
And what rough beast, its hour come round at last
Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?

- William Butler Yeats (1921)

Notes:

1. Spiral, making the figure of a cone.
2. Second Coming refers to the promised return of Christ on Doomsday, the end of the world; but in Revelation 13 Doomsday is also marked by the appearance of a monstrous beast.
3. Spirit of the World.
4. 2,000 years; the creature has been held back since the birth of Christ. Yeats imagines that the great heritage of Western European civilization is collapsing, and that the world will be swept by a tide of savagery from the "uncivilized" portions of the globe.

Yeats was attracted to the spiritual and occult world and fashioned for himself an elaborate mythology to explain human experience. "The Second Coming," written after the catastrophe of World War I and with communism and fascism rising, is a compelling glimpse of an inhuman world about to be born. Yeats believed that history in part moved in two thousand-year cycles. The Christian era, which followed that of the ancient world, was about to give way to an ominous period represented by the rough, pitiless beast in the poem.

Things Fall Apart - final week

Greetings! Happy new year!

We started this week with some personal writing, looking ahead to what 2016 might hold for you. Since it is the year of your high school graduation (hopefully) the potential is there for change in a lot of ways. I asked you to think about two different forces of change - internal and external - things beyond your personal control as opposed to those within the scope of what you can.  Then we turned that question to the book and looked at the arrival of the missionaries.

• What are the different forces of change in the book? What are the forces external to the Ibo? What are the forces within the tribe, or within families, or personal to Okonkwo, or other characters?

The next topic we discussed revolved around questions of knowledge and belief. I had you write four sentences starting with the phrase "I know..." followed by four sentences that begin with "I believe...." Our questions then turned to issues present in the middle of the novel:

• What does it take to change a person's beliefs? What does it take to change a person's knowledge? Which is more difficult? Why?

Next I had you re-tell the story of what another person in the class did on winter break. While they were funny and entertaining, it was also a difficult experience for someone to have another person tell their story. This was the question we explored as we read the final chapter of the book as we saw the District Commissioner have the final say.  Why does he get to end the book?

• What does it mean for one person to tell another person's story? What is lost?

Lastly we explored Okonkwo's suicide and your take-aways from the book overall:

• Why does Okonkwo commit suicide?
• Why do things fall apart?

With that last question we noted that neither side can fully be seen as either hero or enemy - that Okonkwo is a flawed character yet also the victim, and the missionaries do not all act the same way (Mr. Kiaga was interested in dialogue but the District Commissioner focused on law and order). And yet the book does give us the chance to see multiple sides of the story in a way we might not have previously known.

African Masks!

In the last two days of class before winter break we made African masks and listened to great Nigerian music. Here are some photos of the finished products!