Thursday, May 28, 2009
Honors American Literature Summer Reading Program
Dear Honors Juniors,
Honors English courses are designed to prepare you for the rigorous language demands of college and require a great deal of reading and thinking during the school year. Research indicates that the more a person reads, the better that person reads, writes, spells, and understands vocabulary (Krashen, 1996). In order to develop, sustain, and sharpen your habit of reading critically, the honors program requires that you read at least two novels of literary quality during the summer months. This summer reading, common practice in schools around the nation, also demonstrates the commitment necessary to succeed in the honors program. The books have been selected for their quality, themes, stylistic interest, and possibility of showing up on the Advanced Placement exam. You may not make substitutions or read a book you have already chosen for outside reading. Stretch!
In preparation for Honors American Literature, you must read and take/make notes on
Tuesday, May 05, 2009
Multimedia TIES Instructions
Here are the instructions for the World's Greatest English Class' final TIES assignment of the year.
Multimedia TIES instructions.
05/05/09 |
Posted by teacher | Category TIES
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Monday, May 04, 2009
Greece/Rome Essay Test
By request from students, here's the prompt for today's essay in Humanities.
Write an essay summarizing the history of Greece and Rome.
Obviously, since the history of both nations spans more than 1,000 years, you're going to have to leave a lot out. One of the criteria of the evaluation of your essay is your ability to tell the difference between what's most important and what's not.
Your essay should be several paragraphs long.
Some hints as to what's important:
The origins of the Greek people
The development of democracy
Alexander the Great
Philosophy, art, drama, architecture, science
The origins of the Roman people
The rise of the Republic
Rapid growth, conquest of Greece, etc.
Civil war
The Golden Age of Rome
Art, Architecture, Science, Literature
Rise of Christianity
Barbarians
Fall of Rome
Wednesday, April 22, 2009
The Nobel Prize Speech: The Elie Weisel Example
The Nobel Prize speeches that are a part of the current English 2 Chrestomathy, will be delivered orally Monday when the classes will meet in the Media Center.
Below you'll find a link to an example, Elie Weisel's Nobel Prize acceptance speech, which has its structure highlighted so you can better understand it, and emulate it in your own speech.
Nobel Prize example
04/22/09 |
Posted by teacher | Category English Two
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Sunday, April 05, 2009
Elie Wiesel: On the Atrocities in Sudan
Elie Weisel, a tireless advocate for world intervention in Darfur has said:
“The opposite of love is not hate, it’s indifference. The opposite of art is not ugliness, it’s indifference. The opposite of faith is not heresy, it’s indifference. And the opposite of life is not death, it’s indifference.”
The following are remarks delivered by Elie Wiesel at the Darfur Emergency Summit, convened at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York on July 14, 2004, by the American Jewish World Service and the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum.
Sudan has become today's world capital of human pain, suffering and agony. There, one part of the population has been - and still is - subjected by another part, the dominating part, to humiliation, hunger and death. For a while, the so-called civilized world knew about it and preferred to look away. Now people know. And so they have no excuse for their passivity bordering on indifference. Those who, like you my friends, try to break the walls of their apathy deserve everyone's support and everyone's solidarity.
04/05/09 |
Posted by teacher | Category General
1 comment |
Sunday, March 22, 2009
Ex-Nazi guard says she 'did nothing wrong' -- and her silence 'was my business'
Demian Bulwa, Nanette Asimov and Meredith May, Chronicle Staff Writers
Thursday, September 21, 2006
Her voice quivering at times and crackling with anger at others, a San Francisco woman deported to her native Germany for serving as a concentration camp guard during World War II said Wednesday that she "did nothing wrong" and had only watched prisoners so they wouldn't "run away."
Elfriede Rinkel, 84, displayed no remorse about what she did at the Ravensbruck concentration camp in northern Germany, where an estimated 90,000 people were killed during the war. And she offered no explanation for why, in all the 42 years she lived with her late husband -- a German-born Jew whose parents died in the Holocaust -- she never told him about her past.
"That was my business," she said simply.
03/22/09 |
Posted by teacher | Category English Two
1 comment |
Thursday, March 19, 2009
More on Maus and Art Spiegelman, from National Public Radio
From NPR:
Morning Edition, January 26, 2004 · With Maus, a comic book based on his parents' survival of the Holocaust, Art Spiegelman won international acclaim -- and the 1992 Pulitzer Prize. In the latest installment of Intersections, a Morning Edition series on artists and their inspirations, NPR's Susan Stamberg explores how the artist was first inspired to use the visual language of comics to tell a dark tale.
Read the rest, and hear Spielgelman interviewed.
Wednesday, March 18, 2009
How I Survived the Kovno Ghetto
by Ephraim Romm
How a teenager carved out hiding places and executed a split-second escape plan.
At the beginning of the Second World War, on June 22, 1941, I was 15 years old. I was a high school student in one of the four Hebrew high schools in Kovno, the capital of Lithuania. Our community also had a Jewish theater, a Jewish hospital, a Jewish orphanage, two daily Jewish newspapers, numerous synagogues, a Jewish technical college, one of the most well known yeshivas in the world (Slobodka), and many other community organizations, such as Jewish burial services, Jewish fellowships for assisting the poor, kosher restaurants, etc.
Read the rest of the story.
Wednesday, March 18, 2009
Maus author Art Spiegelman says:

wikipedia photo
Maus grew out of a comic strip I did in 1971 for an underground comic book: a three-page strip that was based on stories of my father's and mother's that I recalled being told in childhood....In 1977 I decided to do [a] longer work, [and] I set up an arrangement to see my father more often and talk to him about his experiences....Although I set about...to do a history of sorts, I'm all too aware that ultimately what I'm creating is a realistic fiction. The experiences my father actually went through [are not exactly the same as] what he's able to remember and what he's able to articulate of these experiences. Then there's what I'm able to understand of what he articulated, and what I'm able to put down on paper. And then of course there's what the reader can make of that....It's important to me that Maus is done in comic strip form, because it's what I'm most comfortable shaping and working with. Maus for me in part is a way of telling my parents' life and therefore coming to terms with it....It's not a matter of choice in the sense that I don't feel I could deal with this material as prose, or as a series of paintings, or as a film, or as poetry....In looking at other art and literature that's been shaped from the Holocaust-a historic term I find problematic - that material is often very high pitched....I feel a need for a more subdued approach, which would incorporate distancing devices like using these animal mask faces. Another aspect of the way I've chosen to use this material is that I've entered myself into the story. So the way the story got told and who the story was told to is as important [as] my father's narrative. To me that's at the heart of the work.
from Oral History Journal, Spring 1987 )
Saturday, March 07, 2009
World War Two Chrestomathy Materials
This is the last of four chrestomathies each student will be required to complete this year in The World's Greatest English Class. The three links below are the guide for the materials that are needed for completion of the unit:
The first is the Table of Contents for the unit. This will be the first page of the completed chrestomathy. It shows what pages will be needed and in what order the materials will be presented.
The second is the Unit Specifics sheet for the unit. This sheet will not ultimately be included in the chrestomathy but is essential for knowing which options are available on each assignment. For example, included are the words available for the Word Quest and the topics available for all the types of writing in the unit, Narrative, Persuasive, and Response to Literature. The student will be refering to the sheet often.
The final sheet is the rubric that The World's Greatest English Teachers will be using when grading the chrestomathy. The student should print out a copy of this rubric so they will have a good idea how they will be graded, but it will not be included in the chrestomathy.
Thursday, February 19, 2009
Teachers Named "World's Greatest Teachers of the Year"
An independent educational website has, for the third time, named James Logan Language Arts Teachers Tim Campbell and Patrick Hannigan the "World's Greatest English Teachers of 2009."
The teachers won the award last year.
The website, which was nominated for a 2006 Weblog award, chose Campbell and Hannigan for "their outstanding achievements in Language Arts education," according to the website.
The duo earned specific praise for their work in bringing California Standards-based lessons to their classrooms, developing innovative and engaging lessons for the play "Cyrano de Bergerac," the novel "Lord of the Flies" and the seminal satirical political fable, "Animal Farm," and for their revolutionary "outside reading" program known as "TIES," or Thematic Investigation, Exposition and Synthesis, which guides students through a variety of "bundles," which are groups of thematically related books, articles, websites and films, before prompting them to produce a variety of materials in response.
02/19/09 |
Posted by teacher | Category General
121 comments |
Monday, February 16, 2009
The Huckleberry Finn Chrestomathy
Below are links to the documents defining the Huckleberry Finn chrestomathy each American Literature student will be required to complete this year in
The World's Greatest English Class. The three links below are the guide for the materials that are needed for completion of the unit:
The first is the Table of Contents for the unit. This will be the first page of the completed chrestomathy. It shows what pages will be needed and in what order the materials will be presented.
The second is the Unit Specifics sheet for the unit. This sheet will not ultimately be included in the chrestomathy but is essential for knowing which options are available on each assignment. For example, included are the words available for the Word Quest and the topics available for all the types of writing in the unit, Narrative, Persuasive, and Response to Literature. The student will be refering to the sheet often.
The final sheet is the rubric that The World's Greatest English Teachers will be using when grading the chrestomathy. The student should print out a copy of this rubric so they will have a good idea how they will be graded, but it will not be included in the chrestomathy.
The Table of Contents for the Huckleberry Finn Chrestomathy
The Unit Specific Sheet for the Huckleberry Finn Chrestomathy
The Rubric for the Huckleberry Finn< Chrestomathy
02/16/09 |
Posted by teacher | Category Huckleberry Finn
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Thursday, February 12, 2009
Read Animal Farm online
If you need to read Animal Farm at home, it's available free online from Google Books.
Click here to access the book.
02/12/09 |
Posted by teacher | Category Animal Farm
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Thursday, February 12, 2009
American Literature Essay Topics for Death of a Salesman
Death of a Salesman Essay Options
Instructions: Pick one of the topics below and write a complete essay. The final draft must be typed, double-spaced in an easily-readable font. Make sure your name is on the back of the paper. This essay should be between two and three pages in length. Make sure to quote from
Death of a Salesman.
Topic #1:
Prove that Death of a Salesman is a tragedy -or not. Make sure to demonstrate the four elements of the tragedy that we discussed: Peripetea (turn of fortune), Hamartia (tragic flaw or mistake), Anagnorisis (a new awareness), and Catharsis (emotional cleansing). Check the wikipedia entry on “tragedy” if you need to read more on tragedy. This essay will have an introduction and a conclusion and four small-to-average sized paragraphs.
Topic #2 Typically, we think of our dreams and ambitions as wholly positive things, personal driving forces to power our lives. But, sometimes the dreams fail us. Either the dream is impossible to attain, or we are unequipped to attain it, or we hang onto it too long and it corrupts. Dreams aren't always what they are cracked up to be. Write an essay in which you demonstrate, first, how the dream is not a positive thing in
Death of a Salesman. Then, show how it is not a positive thing in another work, like
The Grapes of Wrath, or a reflection of a personal experience. This essay will have an introduction and a conclusion and two average-to-large sized paragraphs.
Wednesday, February 11, 2009
What's a Fable
A fable is a brief, succinct story, in prose or verse, that features animals, plants, inanimate objects, or forces of nature which are anthropomorphized (given human qualities), and that illustrates a moral lesson (a "moral"), which may at the end be expressed explicitly in a pithy maxim.
A fable differs from a parable in that the latter excludes animals, plants, inanimate objects, and forces of nature as actors that assume speech and other powers of humankind.
The word "fable" comes from the Latin "fabula" (a "story"), itself derived from "fari" ("to speak").
02/11/09 |
Posted by teacher | Category Animal Farm
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