From the Chicken Coop-Day 1

It's highly unlikely that anyone will read this, but blogging has been stuck in my teacher brain for a while now.  Usually reserved for when I'm grade-crastinating, I've decided to try something new. My hope is that I'll share a little insight as to why we're doing what we're doing in class. For any parents who may venture over here, I hope that this fills in the blanks for you when you ask your child what he/she did at school today and you get monosyllabic answers. Let me take a moment to apologize to my own parents for being that kid. Eek, gad! 

This week in H1:
Freshmen, you're going to get your first look at our syllabus! I spend way too much time on this for the amount of "what are we doing today?" questions that I get throughout the year. Here's why you'll get a testy look from me...THE SYLLABUS HAS ALL THE ANSWERS! Seriously...it runs our lives. We will not deviate from the syllabus unless I explicitly tell you. I hope you love it as much as I do. 

We're going to take some non-traditional approaches to literary analysis through various visual texts (art & film) this week. My hope is that you'll be able to transfer those skills to our literary texts that we'll be reading together later this week. 

You'll also get a taste of our vocabulary study and one of my favorite assignments, AoW (Article of the Week). Although, now that I've changed AoW to every other week, the name doesn't quite make sense. Oh well. 

All in all, I think this will be a great week for all of us-can't wait to get started! 

This week in H2:
We had such a rich discussion on Friday over chapter 1; I'm so pumped about getting into the rest of the novel with you guys! I hope that y'all are actually reading the book. Please, for the love of all things good and holy, READ THE BOOK! 

Our discussions will be centered around characterization, thematic development, symbolism, motifs, as well as using grammatical elements for literary analysis. WAIT...WHAT? You'll be surprised at what you can glean when you start to isolate some of the writer's choices. Trust me, English teachers can't make up all this stuff! 

You'll be introduced to Tone Tuesday activities, resuming Wordy Wednesday and AoW, and as a bonus, you get to be my living lab experiments for a new year-long thematic study! Try to hold back your tears of joy. You. Are. Going. To. Love. This.