What's cooking for the holidays?

Ahh...we're all so glad we successfully got our Science Fair projects done, yes? Things happen pretty fast around here, and if you're not watching closely you might get left behind. Now that the holidays are upon us we are turning our attention to good meals and spending time with family, as I had a chance to do this weekend already.

As all of you know, we have three main types of speaking and writing we are doing along with our readings in the beloved literature textbook. The three main types include persuasive, informative, and narrative, and we have covered all three in this class already both in speaking and writing this semester. But in this second Quarter we need to do that dance one more time, even if the assignments themselves are a bit shorter. So we will be doing short assignments on these three after we spend this coming week finishing up the scientific research paper that should be connected to your science fair project.


We've accomplished quite a lot this semester, and still have more to go before we are off for Christmas. Two new students - Allen and Book - have successfully joined the class - welcome dudes! Someone upstairs must have figured out Joshua needed someone to help him with all the ladies in the class? The more the merrier, and soon we will be enjoying a merry Christmas, no doubt...

My stack of books to read is getting bigger...so please - no one lend me any more books, OK? Just to report back one one I mentioned here before - Songs of Distant Earth is cool - I am into it now and it has an authentic feeling to it - the author somehow extrapolated a plausible future course for humanity to seed the stars....

Here's what I have worked out for our class in terms of an upcoming schedule of tasks before break. The notes were originally meant for me, and while it may change, it seems doable as I want to keep the amount of info. down to manageable chunks:

Week 15 – Nov. 18 – Nov. 22, 2013

Written Competence: Research Report - due 11/22

Collection 5: Hard Choices – The Road Not Taken (376-377); Homework: p. 380 (1-3, 5-6)

Collection 6: Ties That Bind – The Grandfather (431-433); Homework: p. 434 (5-9)

Spoken Competence: short story excerpt recitation (by end of Q2) and speech meet practice

Written Competence: (finish research report) Short Persuasive Writing on assigned IELTS-like topic (positive)

Grammar standards: sentence types, adjective & noun clauses, dependent & independent clauses, rearranging sentences with improperly placed prepositions or dangling modifiers. Avoiding passive voice, “there is & there are,” and common mistakes of Chinese learners in English. Taught in week 15-16, quizzed in week 17.

Reading Standards: revisit and amend the Literary Terms Sheet from Q1; possible Quiz in week 17.

Week 16 – Nov. 25 – 29, 2013 (Monday to Wednesday class, special lunch on Wed. 11/27; 11/28-29 off)

Spoken Competence: Informative Speaking – an upcoming holiday dish or custom

Written Competence:  (Finish short persuasive essay) Informative writing about a holiday dish or custom.

Wordly Wise 9 Lesson 3 Quiz

Collection 6: Ties That Bind – The Golden Kite, the Silver Wind (438-442); Homework: p. 444 (2,3,5, & 6 or 7)

Week 17 – Dec. 2 – Dec. 6, 2013 Friday, 12/6: Christmas Program

Spoken Competence:  Personal Narrative about a memorable holiday meal, trip, or moment.

Written Competence:  Personal Narrative about a memorable holiday meal, trip, or moment. (note – add detail about dialogue, description of others, significance to self, and something not in speaking)

Collection 6: Ties That Bind – The Scarlet Ibis (416-426) p.428 (3,6,7,8,10) due by 12/12

Grammar Standards quiz – verb tenses, voices, sentence types, adjective and noun clauses.

Week 18 – Dec. 9 – Dec. 13, 2013

Spoken Competence: short story excerpt recitation (by end of Q2) and speech meet practice

Written Competence: Short Persuasive Writing on assigned IELTS-like topic (negative)

Wordly Wise 9 Lesson 4 Quiz

Collection 6: Ties That Bind – The Scarlet Ibis (416-426) p.428 (3,6,7,8,10) due by 12/12

Week 19 – Dec. 16 – Dec. 20, 2013 Exams: Dec. 16-19, Fri. 12/20 off for Students, come back Mon. 1/6/14

Spoken Competence: (tentative) Speaking Test

Written Competence: collect writings into portfolio; next semester bi-weekly notebook checks started.

Prepare for speech meet during break.

Devote a portion of your Christmas break to reading.  J

If You Want to Improve Your Craft of Writing

Read

Read Wide, but Read Smart too

Everyone has a favorite type of thing to read. Discover your favorite poison – both particular pieces of writing and the authors that produce them – and keep reading, but branch out into related areas. Make sure you are getting some non-fiction as well as fiction, and it is best to make a plan. If you are not a meticulous planner, don’t worry – mine is simply keeping several private Amazon wish lists and having a method for my shopping cart before I click on “Proceed to Checkout.” One person who was very serious about his reading plan was Thomas Jefferson, the third President of the United States – by all accounts a genius. He designed Monticello, his home, and had an extensive library installed. Then he methodically read all of his books and kept copious notes. My guess is that he ended up being an acknowledged genius but started out as just as someone like you and me, but also “a man on a mission” – which was neither to become a genius or President but rather to read the best books possible and get as much out of them as he could. Yes, check out the “education” section of Wikipedia on Jefferson – it confirms what I have said and more – for example, when the British burned Washington during the War of 1812, Jefferson sold 6,000 of his books to the Library of Congress to help them get going again. After that, he kept on building up his own collection of books again! For you, the modern writer, a love a reading and love of books will stand you in good stead because from the various styles and ways authors put together their stories and even sentences, you will grow, like a seedling breaking through good soil towards the bright sun.

Travel

Go West Young Man, until the West Becomes the East (see Psalm 103:11-12)

One of the best ways to experience the life and the world is to travel. Doing it for short times is fine, but also have longer stays abroad as part of your life experience. Shorter trips will get you out of your normal routine, put you into contact with new people and their ways of doing things, and you will likely see beautiful sights, both man-made and natural. But the longer stay abroad does something else – it forces you to adopt a different way of doing things, even a different way of communicating. You end up learning about that new place, yes, but you end up learning about yourself and, surprisingly, about your home country because now you have a means of comparison. While this is good for life experience, for your writing it is particularly good if you are in the habit of using a journal of some kind, or taking notes on your experiences. Writing short vignettes of places, people, and even snippets of conversation are all ammunition to be stored in your arsenal for future use – they could become characters or settings in future stories, with real, vivid dialogue. And when choosing how far afield to go – try to go for cultures that are quite different than your own. That’s where more learning happens.

Write Frequently

Write Daily, especially after a Beethovenesque walk in a Pastoral Setting

Beethoven had a very particular routine in his day – he would get up quite early and have a strong coffee for which he counted out 60 coffee beans. Then he would work composing all morning and into the mid-afternoon. After that, he would go for a walk in nature – in the warmer months especially – he would often stay out until supper time and then have dinner out, where he would read the paper before returning home. He would almost never compose in the evenings and pretty much always was asleep by 10 PM. The walks actually helped his productivity, as is shown by the fact that his musical output was higher during warmer months – when it was cold he would just stay home and read. This interesting summary of what I read in “Daily Rituals, How Artists Work” had one more fact that makes it useful for us – Beethoven would always carry a small pocket-sized notebook that he would use to write down any musical ideas he got along the way while walking. Now today we have all kinds of electronic devices, but I still find that the traditional small pad of paper with pen is quite useful and easy to carry along – it also seems less troublesome and serious than sitting down with a lap-top and plugging into the world. I think the idea is to write down your idea and keep on walking here. But when I say Write Frequently, I am not saying “take a walk and then do some writing” – what I mean is that the more serious you are about something the more in infuses your every hour of every day. Beethoven’s work was his composing – towards the end of his life he did not even want to leave his piano bench, so he had a hole put in it so he could easily poop through it into a waiting bucket below. I suppose one you are aware you have that kind of talent – let’s say after you win your Nobel Prize for Literature or the equivalent – don’t go there. However, a serious writer will get up and treat it as a job – not just write when a good writing feeling hits him. Yet, as you are working on writing something, it is a very nice idea to get up and shake up your surroundings by getting into nature – just bring along your pen and paper in case you get ideas you want to write down – and eventually you will get very good at your craft. One poet, e.e. cummings, published almost 3000 poems, and he wrote one poem every day from age 8 to 22, before going to Harvard to study modern poetic forms.

Revise

Use Fresh Eyes to Revise – Revise alone, Revise with friends, then do it all again!

Stephen King says to write a draft, then let it rest. It’s a really good idea that after you finish something, you go away for at least a half-hour before coming back to reread it. Then get out your knife, and start cutting. George Orwell has said to not use long words when short ones will do – similarly, don’t use too many words when few will do. Some types of writing, like poetry, beg for constant revision and that flawless, final touch. Can’t we agree that words in poetry are like powder kegs, full of double-meanings, rhyme, and meter, that could blow at any moment? All I am saying is that we should endeavor to treat our longer works with equal care, if those words are to stand the test of time. Look at William Shakespeare’s wonderful Sonnets, or love poems, perhaps some of the best ever written in any language – “Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day?” (Sonnet 18) or “When in disgrace with fortune and men’s eyes,” (Sonnet 29) – he is using a set pattern. This rigid pattern has iambic pentameter (ta DA ta DA ta DA ta DA ta DA), or five “iams” which are two-syllable pairs that have the stress on the second syllable, and three stanzas of four lines apiece followed by a two line couplet, or 14 lines in total. Follow this link to Sonnet 29, and this link to the Open Source Shakespeare site. To be a poet, remembered worldwide four centuries after your death is a great accomplishment, however, even more unbelievable is the fact that Shakespeare’s plays are nearly all written in this same poetic form. Have a look at Macbeth, from Open Source Shakespeare, Act 1, Scene 1, and you can easily see the end rhymes, although it’s not quite Iambic pentameter that is spoken by the witches. Almost all of the characters are speaking all of their lines in iambic pentameter – except for some lower class characters to give them a different feeling – which means almost the entire play is a poem, in most cases. That kind of discipline, or attention to both the meaning and sound of the words used is rare indeed, and shows a dexterous virtuoso with words, whom we ought to emulate. Treat your writing as fine silver that needs polishing before use, or just as a matter of routine even if you are not using that silverware for dinner at all. When a guest arrives, you’ll be prepared to serve up your best meal of words.

Who’s the Audience? What’s the Message?

You must Know Your Readers if they are Ever to Know You – one writer says “know what they are passionate about and what pisses them off” which sums up “know your readers” quite well. But the readers will know fairly quickly how you are treating your subject and characters, and if you care about what you are doing – if not, chances are they won’t be reading for long. So remember to get their interest early – usually with techniques such as “in medias res,” which basically means to start in the middle of your story or with some action, or with dialogue, description that may include onomatopoeia, or perhaps a question – tell them something they are interested in reading about, and have a message you are trying to get across.

Good structure delivers

What’s the best ride today? If you are getting somewhere in a hurry, then maybe a quick sprint on foot for short distances will work, or a motorcycle for longer distances. If the weather is bad, or the distance is longer, or “the package” has multiple components, then go for a car with a good engine and safety features. If it’s a nice day, and the distance is not exorbitantly long or time too pressing, a bicycle works fine. Just like getting from point A to point B may require some thought in choice of transport, your choice of structure.

While students will likely need to practice how to have paragraphs centered on a topic sentence and papers centered on a thesis statement, and understand how to use 4 to 5 paragraph structure when quickly answering essay questions on timed writing tests, the fact is, much of your writing “after school” will not, um, exactly follow these rules. That brings us to another idea…

Break Rules

Know the Rules, So You Can Have Fun Obliterating Them at the Perfect Moment

I understand rules are good, because they can be easy to remember and useful in application, but understanding the ideas behind the rules is even better, if you have time. You can obviously spend your whole life studying writing and literature and not write anything worthwhile or nothing that earns you much acclaim or income. Aren't there lots of universities filled with a whole lot of professors who did not write much of anything worth noting? And they were probably the ones who wrote those books full of rules to begin with! No, seriously, some time must be spent learning such things as what makes a sentence tick – you got to be a good sentence doctor to your writing, and keep them thriving with proper methods.

If you don’t know what a simple, compound, and complex sentence is, then learn it now, before you suddenly die and people say you never knew that while you lived. After all, the complex sentence can be made pretty simple, once you know what a dependent clause is, and how we like to use them as adjectives pretty often, and sometimes even as nouns or even adverbs. It used to be a good middle school education at our school made all of this abundantly clear, and I think it still does, but we find some of our high school folks are transferring in after those middle school lessons have happened for their classmates, in all honesty. So we’ll try to address it, but in the end, if you don’t know, find out – one way is simply by speaking up, and another way is by writing terrible papers and letting me figure out you don’t know all by myself. Here is a memorable little grammar rule from Kurt Vonnegut that I found in a New York Times article called “Writing Rules! Advice from the Times on Writing Well.”

“Do not use semicolons,” he said. “They are transvestite hermaphrodites representing absolutely nothing. All they do is show you've been to college.”

Showing you've been to college can be pretty useful at times – like when applying for jobs that require a college education. But I am fairly certain they won’t have a semicolon test on your job application. Just remember what Albert Einstein said about education: “Education is what remains after one has forgotten what one has learned in school.” And those school days of yours are coming to an end, faster than you think.

Learning from great writers includes reading great books about how to write, and here are some of the best out there:

If You Want to Write: A Book about Art, Independence, and Spirit –Brenda Ueland

Becoming a Writer – Dorothea Brande

On Writing Well: The Classic Guide to Writing Nonfiction – William Zinsser

Bird by Bird – Anne Lamott

Writing Down the Bones – Natalie Goldberg

The Art of Fiction: Notes on Craft for Young Writers – John Gardner

The Classic Guide to Better Writing – Step-by-Step Techniques and Exercises to Write Simply, Clearly, and Correctly – Rudolph Flesch

Line by Line – How to Edit Your Own Writing – Claire Kehrwald Cook

The Elements of Style, Fourth Edition – William Strunk, Jr.

Some Sources for this post:

Ten  Secrets to Writing Well

Writing Rules! Advice from the Times on Writing Well

ShakingUp Shakespeare Reaching the Shakespeare Averse With Adaptations

Scott Berkun - How to write well, instantly,every time

CharlieRose on Writing 

Voice 

Open Source Shakespeare

Into the Great Beyond with Three Greats

Welcome Cat Stars!

This is our class blog for the "Grade 9 Literature" class, which is really made up of grade 10 students too or anyone the school puts into this time slot - and we do more than literature. We have lots of speaking and writing in our class - but quite a bit of good ol' reading. Our first story was by Arthur C. Clarke - called Dog Star - a classic science fiction story by one of the best sci-fi writers out there.

This past summer I started getting into reading more science fiction and about it - since last year I taught science at our school and this year I knew I would be teaching some English classes again - so it was a natural fit. I found out the "Big Three" science fiction writers were Isaac Asimov, Robert Heinlein, and Arthur C. Clarke. I'd heard lots about Asimov, who was actually a science professor in both Boston and New York. He had written the famous Foundation series, and the I, Robot series, with its famous laws of robotics - there is a 2004 movie with Will Smith on that rated at IMDb as a 7.0 now (highly rated) - you can borrow this movie from me if you like. In case you forgot, here are those laws, from Wikipedia:

 The rules were introduced in his 1942 short story "Runaround", although they had been foreshadowed in a few earlier stories. The Three Laws are:

1. A robot may not injure a human being or, through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm.
2. A robot must obey the orders given to it by human beings, except where such orders would conflict with the First Law.
3. A robot must protect its own existence as long as such protection does not conflict with the First or Second Law.

Robert Heinlein was a good sci-fi writer, too, and I had previously read and mostly enjoyed "Stranger in a Strange Land." When I say enjoyed - as is often the case with science fiction, I enjoy the idea of it a lot...but some of what is being said is not to my liking - I remember I did not enjoy the ending of Stranger in a Strange Land.

For example, I read one of Isaac Asimov's short stories - the one that he said was his favorite of the many that he wrote himself - called "The Last Question." Here is another example of science fiction that may be offensive to some, but is an interesting idea. The universe and infinity, meaning time - is a kind of infinite loop of creation and destruction...the story actually made me giggle a bit at the end. For this, you got to read it from the beginning and go to the end for the desired effect - it is intellectually entertaining and not that long. You will see why he likes it - so there is enough science, culture, and other details to make it believable and interesting but just enough iconoclasm to either excite you or make you angry if you are in the wrong frame of mind.

So then - Arthur C. Clarke, I was so sad, I said to myself, that I had not read his books. They sound so cool - "Childhood's End," "The Songs of Distant Earth," and "Rendezvous with Rama." I have ordered them and am awaiting them eagerly, especially Songs of Distant Earth. But...then I get to our textbook, with which I think myself familiar, and I come to "Dog Star" a story I know and love - but - who is the author? YES, Arthur C. Clarke! I had read and known this author for years and did not know he was famous. Well, yes, he should be - this is a great short story - even memorable. If you like dogs - if you ever had to leave home and someone - or a dog - you love behind, then yes, you must read this. The main character is bonded forever to this German Shepherd Laika not when he saves the puppy from the side of the road as expected, but when the dog saves HIS life in an imaginary future Californian earthquake. The story implies the dog would have died but the astronomer would not leave the dog after that, and he lived...and they lived so closely that they would not be separated more than an hour or two. However, in the future they had great telescopes on the "Far side of the Moon" so he had to either give up his career in astronomy or leave the dog behind on Earth. He scolded himself for even thinking about it...who could feed a dog 3 pounds of meat a day on the moon, anyway? So when his beloved dog wakes him barking again from a dream on the moon and saves his life again in the moon-quake that cracks a hole in the side of their living quarters, letting the oxygen out, but only after he has his protective mask on and has hit the alarm button....it is a masterful work of writing, and all done as a flashback. Now I really want to read his longer stories!

Personally, I still like cats - maybe you can guess why, maybe you can't. But for now, our "cats" will be enjoying lots of the best stories we can find - I hope it will lead you to more and more awesome reading and the love of reading. When that happens, maybe writing about it will also be a part of your thing - but for now, let's practice a bit more by sharing opinions here on these blogs. Enjoy your school year and it is my pleasure to teach you guys in this course!