13.5. Science-Language Arts: Sweden Wants Your Garbage RHST1.

We're running a interdisciplinary ("-ary"means "having to do with," "discipline" means "school subject, " and "inter-" means between, so "interdisciplinary" means "between two subjects" reading to both practice our reading comprehension and analysis and to learn more about how different forms of energy  impact the world around us. So, we found what I hope was a reasonably interesting article about Sweden's relationship with its garbage. Here's the article - "Sweden Imports Waste from European Neighbors to Fuel Waste-to-Energy Plan."

Click on the "Read More" for the Complete Instructions.

12.1. Introduction to Mood RL4.

One of our objectives this year is to develop our understanding of how word choices by a writer can create a mood in a fictional story. However, I think that before we do that, it makes sense to first develop our understanding of what mood is. So, our first goal this week is to talk about emotions in the more exact, rigorous way that we prefer.

Here's a set of quizlet flashcards designed to formalize our knowledge about feelings - did you know that there are eight basic ones? All other emotions are just combinations of the eight (anxiety is fear + anticipation, while eagerness is joy + anticipation), the eight themselves at different intensities (rage is just very, very angry), or the eight in different contexts (jealousy is anger while coveting, and shame is disgust + sadness directed inward). I didn't learn this until I was thirty or so, and I couldn't believe that it wasn't taught in elementary school.

12.2. Symbols, Metaphors, and Allusions

We're talking about symbols, metaphors, and allusions in our class, and I realized that it's tough to tell these apart, partly because they all have the same kind of job -- they are the trapdoors to the theme level.

To review, a story, when it's literature, works on two levels. The first level is the "reading" level -- these characters, with these backgrounds, personalities, and desires have problems with internal and external aspects, which they try and fail to fully solve until they don't (or maybe don't in a really final way). That's what a reading teacher teaches in the elementary school.

There is another level, though, that runs parallel to the literal, "reading" level. This is the metaphoric, or "literature" level. In this level, the story maker is trying to communicate to the reader about universal ideas. The most basic one is theme -- in fact, the theme taught by literary stories is sometimes spelled out inside the plot. However, there is all kinds of other interesting stuff to find.

The literature level is far more difficult to find, because artists usually won't address it directly. They tell a story and bury these messages in it. I'm not sure why; I think that it's because people generally don't like to talk about deep stuff in public, so artists have to hide their vitamins in the chocolate bar. That's me guessing, though.

Anyway, metaphor, symbol, and allusion are three ways that artists try to build trapdoors so that you can find the deeper level hidden there.

1. Metaphor is when an a speaker says that one thing is like a categorically different thing. The two things have some creative connection that makes you understand them better, or remember the point more easily. The last line of The Great Gatsby is something like, "And so we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past." That image of a person trying to row a boat against the current of the water is supposed to be like a person trying to move forward in their life, but they can't, since they are dragged backwards by what happened to them in their past. It's a neat trick; it lets you imagine a really abstract idea. Maybe we can call that one definition of art, it's when somebody tries to take ideas and turn them into objects that you can sense.

2. Symbols work just like metaphors, except the symbol has to be something in the story. In Gatsby, there's no rowboat at the end of the story, so it's a metaphor. However, if a thing (or character) has a deeper, abstract meaning and it IS in the story, too, it's a symbol. These are actually harder to spot than metaphors, because everybody understands how they work in the "reading" level, so it's especially easy to miss their other job. In the story, "The Treasure of Lemon Brown," the titular "treasure" helps drive the plot, because the thugs mistake it for something that they want to steal. However, as a symbol of how worldly accomplishment is most worthwhile because of the pride in you that your loved ones feel, it is key to understanding the theme. It's a helpful trapdoor to the universal "literature" level. If a writer describes anything carefully, a character or (especially) an object, it's a symbol. If a person or thing serves as the title of the story, it's a symbol of something.

3. An allusion is another way to build trapdoors to the deeper level. When James Joyce wanted to build a novel out of a single day's events in the life of one man, he needed to make sure that the reader understood that he was actually trying to wrestle with things he thought were important. So, he built into his novel, Ulysses, a bunch of references to Homer's Odyssey. These allusions let the reader know that Joyce wanted his readers to understand his book as one dealing with those most important things in life, or even life itself, as epics used to attempt. An allusion is a reference to another, more famous story -- usually the author is trying to point out in an indirect way that the two stories share related themes.

4. One last way that writers try to build hinted puzzles for the reader to solve in through puns in names. The names that a writer chooses for places or characters often have meaning that help. In Flowers for Algernon, Daniel Keyes picks the main characters names to let you know how they work -- the dad is Matt (his wife walks all over him), the mom is Rose (she symbolizes blood and anger), and sister, Norma, is the normal child that Rose always wished for.

10.5. Science - Language Arts Interdisciplinary Reading RL2.

Here's a short story by the American fiction master Ernest Hemingway. Hemingway is famous for writing very sparely (he uses few and simple words), but his stories nearly always have some sort of subtext (a story going on underneath the original story). In today's story, "A Day's Wait," a father and son deal with the young boy's illness, but they have very different reactions.

The ending is somewhat of a surprise, but there's a pretty definite reason that we're giving this assignment out as a joint venture between Science and English classes, which gives a bit of a hint.

Click on the title to read "A Day's Wait" by Ernest Hemingway.

When you are done, answer the following questions in a Google Drive document. Write a single SEE paragraph for each. In both paragraphs, make sure to cite specific, quoted evidence from the story as proving examples in your paragraph.

1. Why do the boy and the father have such different beliefs about the boy's illness? What has the boy misunderstood?
2. How does Ernest Hemingway use point of view to construct the story to create the surprising revelation at the ending?
3. If the boy and father were still living in France, how would the (French) doctor have described the boy's condition differently? How would that have affected the plot of the story?

10.1. How Writers Characterize RL3.

This week we're focusing on how writers create people in their stories. It's really an amazing trick; the idea that an artist (or team of artists) can create a story that you know is fake (it's called "fiction" after all, which means "made up"), and still get you to care about them. So, it's worth exploring how they do it.

Here are the basic terms and comprehension that you need to start having these discussions in a literature class:

11.0. Language Arts/Mathematics/Social Studies Reading: On Being a Quant

I thought this article was interesting, and am going to put it up on the page of links under "Mathematics" and "Civics," but thought I should be posting when I am doing this stuff. The article refers to the book Moneyball by Michael Lewis, who normally writes about business matters. The book is about changing the way a baseball team is run in order to try and quantify things number. We use the word "quantify" in our logical essays, it means to understand or express something in quantities, or numbers. The word "quant" is a back formation (that's when people take a word and shorten it to make a new word that's faster to say) that means "a person who believes in understanding the world through the sophisticated use of statistics." Here's the link to the article, "The Statisticians on the Bus: How a Nerd Changed Political Reporting Forever," by Andrew Romano, at Newsweek's website.

Poem of the Week #1

My life been the poem I would have writ,
but I could not both live and utter it.

                                 - Henry David Thoreau

W10. Written Argument Prompt: "For Whom Would You Have Voted?"

The students here always get into the Presidential election, and it's nice to hear the kind of (sometimes heated) discourse in our classrooms. So, I figured that it made sense to write a piece on which candidate each of us would have voted for, had we attained our majority of eighteen.

IYI. A.Word.A.Day

There's a great mass email that I signed up for a couple months ago and thought I'd share if you're interested. It's called A.Word.A.Day, and every day, it sends a new word to your email account. The words are often very rare, (today's word "nonesuch," means "a person or thing without equal," a I would probably never use it in my own writing, because it seems too rare to me, and other people wouldn't get it), but it's a great way to get some really smart person to pick out an interesting word for you.

Also, there's a quotation at the bottom and they're often great, too, I enjoy them as much as I enjoy the word. I highly recommend signing up for a free subscription.

Here's the link to the site to sign up - it's free and I don't think I've received any spam from this site.

13.2. Determining Author Purpose RI6.

Applying Our Knowledge to Construct an Author Purpose Statement

Yesterday, we went over the basics of determining author purpose in a formal way (here's the link to the mastery list if you need the notes).

Today, we are seeking to apply this to an article - "For Navy SEALS, The Biggest Threat May Be Hollywood" from newsweek.com.

So, do this to demonstrate your current level of skill at determining author purpose, first read the article.

Then,
1. Read the article.
2. Open a Document in your Google Drive and name it "RI6. Navy Seals and Hollywood."
2. Write an author purpose sentence (consult the mastery list for the formula, it explains exactly how to phrase this).
3. Write a WHO+WHAT+WHY sentence that determines the main idea.
4. Select five Tier 2 vocabulary words to add to the class's online database.

Notice that the two sentences, the first that states the author purpose and the second that determines the central idea, are similar. This does not mean that you are making a mistake; I am asking for two versions of the same thing.

9.5. SEETH Application Practice R5.

Objective: Today, we're practice the SEETH idea. That's the idea that you can analyze an informational paragraph to determine what role each of the sentences play in it. "SEETH" is an acronym that stands for "Statement-Explanation-Examples-Transition-Hook," like our "SEE" body paragraph slightly expanded.

Do Now:
We need a reading to conduct this on, so here's one that relates to our current theme, because two groups of people have two different sets of values, which causes them some problems in this situation.

This is the reading, open it up first:
"Wolves Are Returning to Oregon, But Not Everyone Is Pleased" from Smithsonian.com

Read the entire article first, and write a WHO+WHAT+WHY central idea sentence in a new document in your Google Drive.

Review You May Need to Do Your Work:
To review -
     There are five kinds of sentences you'll see in nonfiction writing (article and essays) - statements of new main ideas, explanations of that main idea, examples of that main idea, transitions to the next main idea, and hooks (at the very beginning and end). If you know what the author is trying to do with each sentence, you can understand the paragraph and answer questions about it far more easily.


Independent Practice (What I am Going to Grade to See if You Are Novice, Proficient, or Expert at this Skill):

Take the first ten sentences, copy and paste them into the same document you already have made, and label them with a SEETH letter and a short explanation.

Demonstration to Guide Your Work:

For example, (the blue type is my identification and rationale)

Even before the first modern-times wolf moved permanently into Oregon, officials foresaw the potential for the species’ return and the problems the wolves might cause. This is a transition sentence. And so the Oregon Wolf Conservation and Management Plan was enacted in 2005 by the state of Oregon with the intention of readying the state and its people for the presence once again of the gray wolf. This is a main idea; it mentions this management plan for the first time and the rest of the paragraph is about it. The wolf plan outlines just how to respond to wolves that prey upon livestock and at what point Oregon wolves might be removed from the state’s endangered species list as their numbers grow, among other issues of question. This explains how the plan works. Ranchers, hunters, hikers, conservationists, government land managers and other stakeholders took part in developing the wolf plan, Dennehy said. This explains how the plan was made.

Social Studies - Language Arts Interdisciplinary Writing Prompt

This week's essay forces you to assume a role and write from that perspective, so don't forget the RAFT skill - it's our easiest skill, but also easiest to forget doing.
The teachers in eighth grade Social Studies and Language have convened and arrived at a prompt that will test both Writing Skills and Social Studies content knowledge.