iGrade limitations

I'm getting a bunch of semi-panicky emails about the "M" in your Portfolio Final Essay 2 grade. All that means is that the GRADE is missing, not that I'm missing your essay. In fact, if you have an "M," it just means I haven't graded it yet. It's the ZERO that should concern you...that means you didn't turn one in, and you should probably come see me about it asap, as it probably means you're at risk of not passing English, which means you're going to find yourself in night school during the Spring semester, making up English units. Bad sitch, come deal with it before it's too late.

Please Note: Guidelines and Sample Posted

To your left, you should see a list of useful links. There are two new ones: a Guideline/Timeline for the Research Paper and a Sample Essay by one of my best students from last year.

Please download and print a copy of the guidelines...I'm trying desperately to save paper.

You should also note that you're required to begin researching your author, as you're working on an annotated bibliography, due Monday 2/2/09. Most of you did this in 10th grade for your I-Search. If you didn't, you should ASK me how it's done, I will post an example in the classroom. It's not hard, but I WILL be very nitpicky about this one...most of the time, I'm not a stickler for MLA. On THIS project, I am.

Good luck. ASK FOR HELP IF YOU NEED IT!!!

Good job, everyone!

Wow, 75 out of 82 have posted their choices already, with 24 hours left to go. I'm impressed.

Here's a treat for you, Monty Python's Writer's Sketch...where Oscar Wilde and James Whistler gang up on George Bernard Shaw.

A perfect example

UPDATE: Sample removed post deadline.

Here is a sample essay from Mika that exemplifies what you should do for this assignment.

Early Deadline Reminder

Since we're not in school today (yay!), you need to EMAIL me your critical analysis essay by midnight tonight if you want the early deadline grade option.  I will have them back to you by 3pm on Tuesday, which gives you a couple of days to polish them up for the Thursday final deadline.  Remember, I don't accept late work on these essays, period.  You've had MONTHS to work on it, there are no excuses at this point.

We're covering Pygmalion tomorrow through Thursday. I know a lot of you have seen My Fair Lady, which is a musicalized version of the play, but since G.B. Shaw would've HATED it, I find it hard to stomach...even though I have to admit that it's visually lovely (not loverly...ew).  The songs, though, are so embarrassingly BAD, I can't watch them without feeling sorry for the actors.

Anyhow, to give you a sense of how Shaw himself wanted Pygmalion to be experienced, click below on the YouTube video of the 1938 film version, for which Shaw himself won an Oscar for the screenplay.  The entire film is available in 10 minute clips, if you want to view it on YouTube.  But don't skip the reading, as half the fun is in Shaw's stage directions...and weird spelling foibles.

Dibs on writers

Update: Sorry for the confusion...I forgot to SAVE the new settings when I changed it. I have published all the comments that were backed up in the queue, they are in DESCENDING order. Since the comments are saved in the order sent, it doesn't change anything...if someone beat you to the punch, and you didn't have a back-up, you need to post again. They should post immediately now, though.  You have until 10pm tomorrow.  

Beginning at 5pm on Wednesday 1/21/09, through 10pm on Thursday 1/22/09, you need to choose an author for your 2nd semester research project by COMMENTING ON THIS POST.  In your comment, make sure to include your name, period, and the author you've selected.  This way, you can easily see who has already been taken and who has not by reading the previous comments.  If you are absolutely unable to comment during this window, you may ask a friend to do it for you, just so long as it's clear who is choosing which author.  Please do not comment on each other's comments in this case...it just gets unwieldy.  Anyone who has NOT chosen an author by Monday 1/26/09 will be at a serious disadvantage for the Writing Workshop scheduled on that day.

(If you jump the gun and post before 5pm Wednesday, it won't count.  Everything's time and datestamped.  Fair is fair.)

Refer to the following list, taken from page 54 of the College Board's AP English Course Description.  If you choose one of these authors, or anyone on the syllabus, you don't need my approval. If you want someone not on the list, run it by me first.

AUTHORS
W. H. Auden; Elizabeth Bishop; William Blake; Anne Bradstreet; Edward Kamau Brathwaite; Gwendolyn Brooks; Robert Browning; George Gordon, Lord Byron; Lorna Dee Cervantes; Geoffrey Chaucer; Lucille Clifton; Samuel Taylor Coleridge; Billy Collins; H. D. (Hilda Doolittle); Emily Dickinson; John Donne; Rita Dove; Paul Laurence Dunbar; T. S. Eliot; Robert Frost; Joy Harjo; Seamus Heaney; George Herbert; Garrett Hongo; Gerard Manley Hopkins; Langston Hughes; Ben Jonson; John Keats; Philip Larkin; Robert Lowell; Andrew Marvell; John Milton; Marianne Moore; Sylvia Plath; Edgar Allan Poe; Alexander Pope; Adrienne Rich; Anne Sexton; Percy Bysshe Shelley; Leslie Marmon Silko; Cathy Song; Wallace Stevens; Alfred, Lord Tennyson; Derek Walcott; Walt Whitman; Richard Wilbur; William Carlos Williams; William Wordsworth; William Butler Yeats; Aeschylus; Edward Albee; Amiri Baraka; Samuel Beckett; Anton Chekhov; Caryl Churchill; William Congreve; Athol Fugard; Lorraine Hansberry; Lillian Hellman; David Henry Hwang; Henrik Ibsen; Ben Jonson; David Mamet; Arthur Miller; Molière; Marsha Norman; Sean O’Casey; Eugene O’Neill; Suzan-Lori Parks; Harold Pinter; Luigi Pirandello; William Shakespeare; George Bernard Shaw; Sam Shepard; Sophocles; Tom Stoppard; Luis Valdez; Oscar Wilde; Tennessee Williams; August Wilson; Chinua Achebe; Sherman Alexie; Isabel Allende; Rudolfo Anaya; Margaret Atwood; Jane Austen; Saul Bellow; Charlotte Brontë; Emily Brontë; Raymond Carver; Willa Cather; Sandra Cisneros; John Cheever; Kate Chopin; Joseph Conrad; Edwidge Danticat; Daniel Defoe; Anita Desai; Charles Dickens; Fyodor Dostoevsky; George Eliot; Ralph Ellison; Louise Erdrich; William Faulkner; Henry Fielding; F. Scott Fitzgerald; E. M. Forster; Thomas Hardy; Nathaniel Hawthorne; Ernest Hemingway; Zora Neale Hurston; Kazuo Ishiguro; Henry James; Ha Jin; Edward P. Jones; James Joyce; Maxine Hong Kingston; Joy Kogawa; Jhumpa Lahiri; Margaret Laurence; D. H. Lawrence; Chang-rae Lee; Bernard Malamud; Gabriel García Márquez; Cormac McCarthy; Ian McEwan; Herman Melville; Toni Morrison; Bharati Mukherjee; Vladimir Nabokov; Flannery O’Connor; Orhan Pamuk; Katherine Anne Porter; Marilynne Robinson; Jonathan Swift; Mark Twain; John Updike; Alice Walker; Evelyn Waugh; Eudora Welty; Edith Wharton; John Edgar Wideman; Virginia Woolf; Richard Wright; Joseph Addison; Gloria Anzaldúa; Matthew Arnold; James Baldwin; James Boswell; Jesús Colón; Joan Didion; Frederick Douglass; W. E. B. Du Bois; Ralph Waldo Emerson; William Hazlitt; bell hooks; Samuel Johnson; Charles Lamb; Thomas Macaulay; Mary McCarthy; John Stuart Mill; George Orwell; Michael Pollan; Richard Rodriguez; Edward Said; Lewis Thomas; Henry David Thoreau; E. B. White

About the vocab test next Monday...

We're going to try yet another format for this vocabulary test. Hopefully, it'll be doable but not too easy.

Each of you are already assigned to a writing group of either 6 or 7 people. In these groups, you will draw 10-15 vocabulary words out of a hat (it's not literally a hat, more like a jar, but you get the idea). Your group will need to write a story using these words...yes, one story per group, there's no way I could grade 82 of them.

It is still an open note test, as long as the notes are handwritten...everyone in the group should turn their notes in with their story so I can see who prepared in advance and who did not.

Obviously, you won't know which words you're going to get, so you should have a good grasp of EVERY word, just in case.

Finally, each person will need to EMAIL me with a paragraph describing how their group came up with the story, and which parts they personally contributed. This email is due by 10pm Monday night. Without this email, you will not get any credit for your participation in the group, even if everyone else says you did a great job.

Any questions? Ask them now. You have SIX days to prepare for this test.

Revision Reminder

Just a note to remind y'all that you have a typed revision of your critical analysis essay due tomorrow. Writing workshop, peer editing. Don't forget!