Tuesday, September 11 and Wednesday, September 12

Freshmen: Today our focus was on literal and figurative language. Revise your four current poems, integrating figurative language where appropriate. You are also to write a fifth poem, one that uses figurative language well and adheres to our previous principles. Read for 20 minutes Tuesday and Wednesday; vocab is due Friday.

Sophomores: Today our focus was on various writing techniques found in Life of Pi. We then introduced our first essay assignment of the year.

Essay assignment: Life of Pi is essentially the story of how an event shaped a particular person’s life and turned him into the person he is today. Look back on your life. Tell the story of an event (or multiple events if you wish) that helped shape who you are today. In your essay, you must do a couple of things. One is you must cite from Life of Pi at least three times. In other words, use Martel’s words to help tell your story. A second requirement is you must use the rhetorical techniques that we studied in class, namely listing, using a variety of sentence structures, and using repetition (of both words and structures). Your essay must be submitted to turnitin.com by 8 AM on Wednesday, September 19. The necessary info for turnitin.com can be found on the blog and in the classroom.

Due Friday is vocab; also due Monday is Part II with twelve notes for seminar and two Echoes of the Tao entries.

CNF: Today we did an implicit association test through Harvard's website. The IAT we did was the race IAT. As homework, do at least one other IAT through Harvard's site. It can be most easily found by googling "IAT" and then clicking on the harvard.edu address.