Here's the skinny on this penultimate week of February: 

Monday: "Why Don't You Dance?" by Raymond Carver (a wonderful & wacky story, eh?)
Tuesday: Group annotations & 442 of story
Wednesday: Socratic seminar (You guys Beyonce-ishly slayed it!)
Thursday-Friday: Benchmark

Oh, and there was an actual double rainbow this week in Martinsburg. Shout to Eli M. for tweeting me a pic. 

Here's to hard work and the weekend! 

Great progress this week! The most fantastic thing that happened was student-choice reading. Holy smokes am I excited about this. I've seen the best focus I've seen all year with independent reads, and I'm excited to see where this goes and how it grows. I'm very proud of you, and I'm so happy to have you reading what you WANT to read. 

Here's what we did this week: 

On Monday, we talked about being a person in the world. We worked together to fill out these alpha boxes with universal theme topics like acceptance, betrayal, commitment, determination, and so on...

Tuesday, you guys had a sub and you spent some time reading and then watched a TED talk on connectedness and loneliness. 

Wednesday, we double rainbow-ed it and practiced identifying theme with images. 

Thursday, it was The Story of an Hour plus annotations and a 442. 

And today, Friday, we either built theme fortune tellers, finished up and shared out our 442s, or elected for an on-the-fly (and very successful) Read What You Want Day (YES, 5th period!). 

I'll take it. Good work everybody. 

Since I last updated and checked in here, a lot has happened. Like, A LOT of snow. Mega, mega snow. It was beautiful and relaxing, but now we're back at it. You've since finished up your Timeline Writing Projects, fine-tuned and turned them in, and now we're off and running in a short fiction unit. 

As mentioned in class, I'm quite excited to be changing it up and coaching you up in close reading. So far, you guys are rocking it! 

Because it's Friday night and I'm updating from home and I don't have our official unit text packet in front of me, I'll go ahead and link you to what we've covered this week. 

This week, you learned a BRAND NEW text analysis strategy called 4-4-2. You took notes on the strategy, and then as a class, we applied it to the song Long Black Veil, which many of you were surprised and delighted by (in a dead lover kind of way anyway). 

We also read a lovely, sad, and somewhat mind-bending story by Haruki Murakami called "On seeing the 100 percent perfect girl one beautiful April morning." We, of course, worked together to 442 it, and we shared our very best notices and questions. 

We ended our week together by heading to our beautiful media center to search for books you GENUINELY might want to read. Mrs. Fleming pitched some info to you (isn't she delightful?), and we used your STAR scores to set your course. A lot of you walked away pretty excited about your new books! 

​It was a great week in English 10. Kudos to you all!