September
22
ELA 20: Sept 22 “Penny in the Dust” questions / Formal Literary Paragraph examples…
- Students were first reminded to complete their summary paragraphs of the first sub-unit of “Childhood”. Those who were here for the essay typing class in the pc room had a chance to do this. The summary paragraphs, as a whole, will be worth 10% of your overall class mark so it’s important to complete them all, but no absolute due-date is set. They are compulsory but flexible in the time they’re completed.
- We reviewed the story “The Penny in the Dust” and went through student responses to the questions they worked on last Friday. Several students were missing last Friday but they still tried to contribute answers based on their memory of the story, so thank you for your participation. We pointed out, specificially, the symbolism of the penny in the story and discussed how the thing / idea it represented changed a few times in the story.
- The students were then given a blue assignment sheet that identified their next assignment – to write a body paragraph for a Formal Literary Essay.
This type of essay differs from a personal or general reflective essay in several ways:- It has to be based on a piece of literature, the topic of it or the author’s use of a type of element of literature or whatever your essay topic is about. It has to give evidence and be based on literature.
- It is always present tense. As we discussed in a previous class, if I pick up the book “Twilight”, the main characters are always currently still in action. We read it in the past so our first instinct is to discuss it as “past tense” but it is always still happening, each time we open the book. Because of this, any discussion or analysis of literature is always in present tense. (The author realizes his mistake and attemps to fix his errors.” (The verbs should be in present tense, which can be difficult to spot out so we’ll work on developing that.)
- There are no personal pronouns, like “I” or “we” or “us” or “them”. Keep it purely objective and distant from yourself. (Formal.. formal… formal!!)
- We talked about the format (just briefly) for integrating quotations or references into your writing. We’ll look at that in more detail but it has to be integrated into your own sentence, not just “dropped in”.
- Because it was pretty much me talking / explaining / showing examples of writing on the smartboard and little interaction needed from students, they were pretty tired and it was difficult to keep their attention on the subject, so we narrowed it down to one specific thing to remember from today’s discussion of formal body paragraphs. Each student had to contribute one point I discussed with them, and a few were stumped so their peers helped them out with that. We compiled the list on a pdf document and they’ve all made a copy for themselves. If they remember nothing else from today, they’ll have to remember these nine things!!
- Tomorrow, students will have time to look for the symbolism of the story “The Rink” and I’ve given them a hint in saying there is more than one object that is symbolic of something there. We’ll spend time practicing integrating references / quotes before they do their paragraph assignment, but this will be our focus for the next few days.