1. I was really impressed that three students came to class before school to get help with a few questions they couldn’t complete for homework. Some of them had difficulty completing their comment on the blog, as well, because they forgot they could access my blog from the school website. It’s still early and they’ll get more used to it.
2. We read through all the questions and everyone took turns giving their response. We elaborated on some, but for the most part I was really pleased with the quality of their responses.
3. I showed them a video of famous author Robert Frost talking about his poetry and how he feels about it. His poem, “The Road Not Taken” is quite a popular and well-known one, but it’s interesting to actually see the man who wrote it and hear him speak of poetry like children.
4. We read a poem of his, then, called “The Witch of Coos”. I started retyping it out, not in the poem-form that appears on their page, but as a short story with whole sentences until the punctuation (from the poem) ends a sentence. Looking at the poem like this, it seems very much like a simple short story tucked into the format of a poem.
5. We read through it and students volunteered summaries or ideas for what certain aspects mean. They all agreed, though, that it was somewhat creepy but interesting. We started trying to answer a few of the following questions:
   1. Who did “the bones” belong to? What evidence is there in the poem to support our answer?
   2. Who killed the bones?
   3. What happened to her husband?
   4. What kind of relationship does it seem she has with her husband? Support?
   5. Did her husband ever see or hear the bones? If not, what does that suggest?

We’ll continue on Tuesday.

The Witch of Coos poem

1. We finished reading through the handout from yesterday that discussed the Elements of Literature. We focused a fair amount of attention to explaining the difference between the point of views possible in literature.
2. We talked some more about trying to pinpoint the climax of the story – we’re not all in agreement on that point. I told them they would have to reach their own conclusion and be able to support it at the end of class.
3. They were given a second handout of twelve questions that focused on the Elements of Literature in the story. They were given twenty minutes to work on answering them individually – this will be my first look at the level of work they do in this class.
4. With about twenty minutes left in class, we went to the drafting lab where they were given the option of doing two things – both due for homework tomorrow:
   1. They could use the class time / computer time to go to my homework blog and write their conclusion about what is the climax of the movie, and then finish their questions at home.
   2. Or they could choose to finish the blog comment at home on their own time and use the twenty minutes to finish their questions for tomorrow.

      Click here to read the comments they’ve posted.

5. Tomorrow, I’ll go through their questions and we’ll move on to a spooky and mysterious poem called “The Witch of Coos”!

1. Because a few people were away yesterday for Driver Training, Taron volunteered to carefully summarize what we’ve learned so far in reading the short story titled “The Death Trap”. He did a great job. That blended nicely into continuing the story, from what turned out to be the beginning of the real action.
2. Studying short stories is very common in English classes, but ensuring students know the proper terms and meaning for them is pretty important. They were given a handout that reviews specific things we’ll talk about with each story we read, such as the tone or the author’s style of writing. Some of these things were familiar to them and others were new.
3. We created a plot outline on the board and everyone contributed their ideas as to what events should be noted in the “rising action” section or what specific thing was actually the “climax”, which caused quite a bit of discussion. There was no real consensus, so that discussion hasn’t ended.
4. We spent a bit of time going over the types of characters authors can include in literature: stock, round, and dynamic. We also had quite a debate about what qualities define a protagonist and antagonist.
5. Students have to come tomorrow with the blog name they’ve decided on so I can get started creating their blogs. They were asked, though, as part of their first experience with my own homework blog, to add a comment regarding either examples of the following:
   
   1. A protagonist from a story or movie who isn’t so easily distinguished as being the “good character” since they’re somewhat flawed and have evil characteristics.
   2. What exactly is the climax of the story we read – when he enters the water, when they realize the straightjacket has been gaffed, when he still hasn’t come up in the water? Give your opinion and be sure to back it up!

Death Trap story

1. to begin class, today, we read through a handout that went over the procedures and expectations for class. It also covered how to hand in assignments, what they can expect when they’re given one, what my procedure is for late assignments and lates in general.
2. We also took a quick look at a few of the student blogs students worked on last year. Blogs, again, are one of the components of this course. We looked at several to see how unique they can be and to look at the type of content that they’ll be asked to create.
3. Then started with the first unit today titled Mystery and Suspense. To get in the mindset of what this entails, we watched a short clip of David Blaine attempting to break the world record for the longest amount of time holding his breath… under water. (It was on Oprah.) He was under the water for over sixteen minutes – I don’t buy it! Whether or not it was real, it fit nicely with the first story we were going to study about a similar dare devil from the past (a fictional character) who was going to attempt a similar stunt. We started reading through the story together and had to end just before the real tension began because the bell went. We’ll find out what happens tomorrow!

Here’s the end of the video we watched.