Honors Prompt #5: Speak and Lord of the Flies 2

Hi. Please respond to the following prompt. Your responses should be a couple of paragraphs long, respond to an idea that another student poses, and cite directly from one or more of the texts. You must post by 8 AM on Wednesday, December 7. You may post multiple times if you wish. Include your first name and your period, please.

Prompt: How do the various settings in both Speak and Lord of the Flies (the high school, the jungle, the woods, the party, etc.) contribute to the characters' behavior? How are the settings of the two books similar?

Tuesday, November 29 and Wednesday, November 30

Freshmen: Today we began a study of our next rhetorical device - compare and contrast. We read the essay on Grant and Lee in Models for Writers. Your job is to write a compare and contrast essay - your final draft is due on Monday. Be sure you list the intended lead and conclusion technique in your header. Read for 20 minutes Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday, as well as over the weekend.

CNF: We began Hoop Dreams today.

Basketball: We are done at Sunnyside at 5:45 today.

Monday, November 28

Freshmen: Today we focused on finding the "central thread" of your Grandparent Project interviews - whatever that idea is that will drive your essay. Due next block period is your revised Seven Step Essay - be sure to annotate your revisions on the page. Read for 20 minutes Monday - Thursday. The Grandparent Project Essay is due 12/16.

CNF: Today we began reading Freakonomics Chapter 3. You need a dozen notes for seminar sometime next week.

Basketball: Today we are at Sunnyside until 5:30.

Honors Prompt #4: Lord of the Flies 1

Hi. Please respond to the following prompt. Your responses should be a couple of paragraphs long, respond to an idea that another student poses, and cite directly from one or more of the texts. You must post by 8 AM on Wednesday, November 30. You may post multiple times if you wish. Include your first name and your period, please.

Prompt: How are Speak and Lord of the Flies essentially the same story?

Tuesday, November 22

Freshmen: Today we had our final seminar on Speak. Due for next block period is an annotated, revised version of your Seven Step Essay that is on turnitin.com. Honors students, don't forget about the posts and the seminar on 12/8. You should have Lord of the Flies read by that date with a dozen seminar notes.

CNF: Today we had our seminar on the films we used as an example of information asymmetry.

Basketball: We are at Sunnyside until 5:30 today, and at Sunnyside from 10:30-1:00 Wednesday.

Monday, November 21

Freshmen: Today we did a self-assessment of your narrative essays. Due tomorrow is the rest of Speak and your seminar prep notes for the fourth Marking Period.

CNF: Today we concluded So Much So Fast and will conduct our seminar on the documentaries tomorrow.

Basketball: We are at Sunnyside this week. Monday and Tuesday we will end at 5:30, and Wednesday, we are there from 10:30-1:00.

Friday, November 18

Freshmen: Today we conducted a seminar on the second and third marking periods of Speak. We will have our final seminar on the end of the book on Tuesday, November 22. You should have five notes on the final marking period for the seminar on that day. Due Monday is your narrative essay.

CNF: Today we continued So Much So Fast. We will conclude on Monday and have a seminar on Tuesday.

Basketball: We have practice today until 5:30 at Sunnyside and on Saturday we have our intrasquad and parent meeting at Judge.

Thursday, November 17

Freshmen: Today we looked at another example of a good narrative essay to aid you as you write your own, Gary Soto's "The Pie" (in Short Takes) and "How I Got Smart" by Steve Brody (in Models for Writers). Your narrative essay is due on Monday, 11/21. Finish the second and third Marking Period in Speak for Friday's seminar on 11/18 with 10 questions total, 5 per Marking Period.

CNF: Today we began a second documentary on information asymmetry. We'll conduct a seminar on these films Tuesday.

Basketball: We're at Westminster today until 5:30.

Honors Prompt #3

Hi. Please respond to one of the following prompts. Write at least a couple of paragraphs. Cite specific passages (with page numbers) from the book if appropriate. Read and respond to what others have written in your response. Your response should be posted before midnight Tuesday, 11/22. Be sure to include your first name and period. Thanks.

**I edited this to read Tuesday, 11/22. Originally it read Monday, 11/22. Sorry if there was confusion.

Prompts:
What scene (or scenes) in Speak did you visualize most clearly while reading?
Or
How did your opinion or feelings about Melinda change over the course of the book and why?
Or
What connections did you make (text to text, self, or world) while reading Speak?

Grandparent Project Example #2

Yes, Marilyn and Derrell, There is a Santa Claus
-For Marilyn and Derrell, who are wonderful neighbors

Well over 100 years ago – December of 1897, to be exact – a little girl wrote a letter to the now defunct New York Sun, inquiring whether or not Santa Claus was real:
Dear Editor-
I am 8 years old. Some of my little friends say there is no Santa Claus.
Papa says, “If you see it in The Sun, it’s so.” Please tell me the truth,
is there a Santa Claus?
-Virginia O’Hanlon

Fortunately, The Sun reported the truth that Santa Claus is in fact real. And though The Sun is no longer around, today little Virginia could have asked Marilyn and Derrell Morgan her question and received the same answer, for their Christmases are proof. Take their first Christmas together as a married couple in 1969. It was a hectic year for them. They had begun training to run an Artic Circle franchise on Marilyn’s birthday, December 11, and worked for 12 hours a day learning the ins and outs of the new business they had bought so that Derrell could get out of the car business.
This left precious little time for shopping. Fortunately, Santa Claus (in the form of their sisters) saved the day. Derrell and Marilyn gave their sisters some money and the sisters did their shopping. And, as usual, Santa hit a homerun: Marilyn said they liked the gifts from one another they “hadn’t chosen.”
Their sisters that year were just one of the various forms Santa Claus took throughout their lives. They always had good Christmases as children. Marilyn described her childhood home, on Vine Street, as a “winter wonderland.” She recounted how their large property was lined with trees, and remembered that around Christmas time, a man who worked for her father at the gravel pit – Henry, his name was – would come down to their home with a loaf of bread his wife had baked. He arrived atop his horse, pulling a sleigh, and with his long beard reminded them of Santa Claus. He took Marilyn’s family for a sleigh ride each year, and that remains one of her most cherished Christmas memories.
There were other wonderful things about Marilyn’s childhood Christmases, too. She said that her favorite thing as a girl was coming out and seeing all the presents arranged in the room where they kept the tree. Christmas day meant the family would come over, “13 or 14 of us,” she said. “Not large, but large enough. I came from quite a good family.” She recalled winters spent skating on the pond as well as the year her brother got a toboggan. The best gift she received as a girl was a ballerina. Christmas evenings were spent with her cousins at her house, playing, while the grown-ups went next door to her aunt and uncle’s for a glass of wine. “We didn’t tear the house apart, or anything,” she said. “You know, we just played with whatever Santa brought us.”
Derrell, too, had a beloved Santa in his childhood, his Uncle Barney. Derrell’s favorite Christmas as a young boy was the one when his Uncle Barney gave him a stack of model airplanes. This began a lifetime love of airplanes for the self-described “airplane fanatic” who nearly got his pilot’s license and served his country in World War II by repairing damaged planes. In fact, it seemed that Derrell got a model airplane every year. “And I loved every one of them,” he said. It is a love that persists to this day, and probably is due in part to the love Uncle Barney showed Derrell that Christmas, as well as on many other occasions.
For while Uncle Barney was there for Derrell that best Christmas, he was also there on one of the worst ones, following the divorce of Derrell’s parents. “Divorces are hard on families,” Derrell said. “You don’t want to remember them sometimes, but you do... There’s a lot of things in life you just don’t care to remember.”
While Derrell might still reluctantly remember how hard it was to have his parents split up and his mother depressed, he gratefully remembers Uncle Barney bringing him gifts and doing what he could to make that Christmas a good one.
That wasn’t the only hard Christmas Derrell had to make the best of, either. He had to spend three Christmases away from his family while serving his country during World War II. He spent two Christmases in San Francisco, and one in Norman, Oklahoma. He said it was often lonely in his apartment during these times, and that he “shed a lot of tears in a lot of different places. You just don’t go through something like that with a smile on your face.” However, Derrell dealt with it with pride and dignity, as he has any time he has faced a difficulty, and it has made him appreciate the good Christmases he’s had since even more.
One Christmas that stood out after that hard time as especially wonderful was their first Christmas with Nicky. Marilyn said they lived in “a neat-looking apartment – The Willows,” and were able to have at thirty-foot tall Christmas tree. She remembered how Nicky was almost a year old at that point, and on Christmas Eve, Derrell lay on the bed with her and read her “’Twas the Night Before Christmas” – a tradition they have continued the rest of their lives, and it hasn’t mattered who the audience was – children, grandchildren, or pets.
Marilyn said, “At Christmas, you remember what your kids were like when they were little.” And like most of us, the Morgans see Christmas as a measuring stick that marks how their children and their lives changed from year to year. “It is mostly reflected in the presents they wanted,” she said. She recalled the year Nicky only wanted books, for example.
Certain gifts have also become a part of the traditions they celebrate each year as Marilyn and Derrell take up Santa’s mantel. For example, Derrell always gives his grandson George something special each year. One year, as George was moving up the ranks as a Boy Scout, Derrell gave him his old pocketknife. This was particularly meaningful because it was the same knife Derrell’s grandfather gave to him. He also gives George a plane every year – one he either buys or builds – and they also recalled the year he gave George a train similar to the one he gave George’s mother when she was little.
Marilyn does the same, giving the kids things that were hers, or crocheting them little things. It’s these kinds of traditions that help make Christmas special for the Morgans. Which, of course, brings us back to Santa Claus.
Nicky, Marilyn recalled, was always up early on Christmas morning, checking to see what Santa brought. “Sammy was harder to wake, so we had to stall Nicky,” she said – a problem compounded by the fact Sammy wouldn’t come out until her hair was perfect (even as a four year old). They recalled the big thrill of one year giving the girls a table Derrell had made, painted with little lions by Marilyn. When Nicky was three, Marilyn bought her many different lions, and bought her lion ornaments whenever she could. Both Marilyn and Derrell recalled their girls’ childhood Christmases fondly, and Derrell remarked that they kept quite a few things around that held memories for them, and that “you get a tear in your eye when you remember all this.”
These tears and these memories of love and generosity and devotion are as wonderful as Santa himself, and prove his existence. To again quote from The Sun’s response to little Virginia,
Yes, Virginia, there is a Santa Claus. He exists as certainly as love and
generosity and devotion exist, and you know that they abound and give to
your life its highest beauty and joy. Alas! how dreary would be the world if
there were no Santa Claus. It would be as dreary as if there were no Virginia.
There would be no childlike faith then, no poetry, no romance to make tolerable
this existence. We should have no enjoyment, except in sense and sight. The
eternal light with which childhood fills the world would be extinguished…

No Santa Claus! Thank God! he lives, and he lives forever. A thousand years
from now, Virginia, nay, ten times ten thousand years from now, he will
continue to make glad the heart of childhood.

And it is my hope that these memories will continue to make glad the hearts of the Morgans, and that they can feel each other’s love and the Christmas spirit for many, many years to come.

Grandparent Project Example #1

“I’ll Be Home For Christmas, You Can Count on Me…”
-For all of the Bairds, but especially for Betty and Bob
Betty Jane Baird has had a lot of Christmas mornings in her life, most of them wonderful. But one Christmas stands out as being especially great – the Christmas of 1945. Betty had spent the previous two Christmases – and almost three entire years - without her husband, Bob, who was serving in the US Air Corps in England. But with World War II over, many of our boys were coming home, and Betty was no different than the thousands of other young women anxiously awaiting the return of her husband.
“He’d promised me for weeks that he’d be home for Christmas,” she told me. “But for about two weeks before Christmas, we didn’t hear anything from him. This was very unusual, because we heard from him all the time.”
Christmas morning came, and Betty spent the morning with Bob’s parents. She was living with them at the time. Then around noon, the phone rang. It was Bob. He told her he was at Fort Douglas – he’d gotten in last night, but had to be “mustered out” before he could leave. “He’d said he’d be home for Christmas, and he just made it,” Betty said, laughing her trademark laugh. “We hadn’t heard from him for so long because he’d come home from England by boat, even though he was in the Air Corps.” As we spoke, neither of us could figure out why air corps would get sent home by boat when almost everyone else came home by plane, but that’s the military for you. Maybe there really is something to all those jokes on “MASH”…
That day, Bob’s parents drove Betty up to Fort Douglas to pick him up, as she didn’t have a car. After visiting with family and friends for much of the day, the young couple had to go buy Bob underwear and socks. “And those things were hard to come by in those days, you know, because of the war,” she said. Apparently, while the rest of the corpsmen were reusing their old underwear and socks on the long boat ride home, Bob just threw his overboard once they became dirty. So while Bob got the stereotypical worst gift you can get for Christmas – underwear and socks – Betty got the best gift she could have asked for.
That Christmas was just one of many they shared together. When I asked Betty about those that followed, as a mother and grandmother, she often used the word routine. I am sure given the first few Christmases she spent as a young married woman, the normalcy of the Christmases that followed seemed wonderful. But even those normal events had a Baird twist to them.
For example, getting the tree was quite an event. The entire family went together, and given the personalities of Bruce, Brett, and Marsha, let alone Bob, I can imagine the experience was both excruciating and fun. I have heard stories about going to multiple tree lots, come hell and high water (and lots of snow), to find the perfect tree. Once they found it, the family would drive home, holding the tree alongside the car through the open windows. They’d then decorate the tree with tinsel and glass balls. “They didn’t have all that fancy stuff we have nowadays,” Betty said. After, when the kids weren’t around, Betty went about straightening the tinsel, getting everything just so.
And it’s not just the tree decorating that’s changed over the years, she told me. Christmas for her as a young girl is much different from how it is today, she said. Betty grew up during the Great Depression, and gift-giving was much more modest. She remembered that one year, both she and her brother, Bob, wanted a bike. And they got one for Christmas – one, which they had to share. It was a boy’s bike, a blue and white one speed. “It didn’t impress me,” she said, and that’s probably a good thing, as she didn’t get to ride it much. Betty remembered her mother sewed a lot at Christmas time, and that the kids always had clothes – dresses, PJs, coats… these were the kinds of things she remembered getting. She also said the family always had a tree and a good dinner on Christmas day – chicken, or sometimes rabbit, which her father raised, fresh bread, and cakes. The important thing was the family was together.
Togetherness was what got her through what she called “a tragic Christmas” – the Christmas of 1956. She was bed-ridden that year, due to terrible arthritis in her hips. This made preparation for Christmas hard, because she hadn’t done any Christmas shopping before the arthritis got bad since they were waiting to get Bob’s bonus check. Bob had to kneel by her bed as they wrote the list. He then did all the shopping, “and it must have turned out all right.” Christmas morning, they had to carry her out to the tree so she could watch the kids open their gifts, but could only stay out there for about an hour before she had to be carried back to bed.
But for the most part, Christmas has been blessedly predictable: trees and family, meals and home. And this is something that continues to this day as we gather together at her house – her children and grandchildren, and now her great grandchildren. Coming to Grandma Betty’s for Christmas feels like coming home, like Grandpa Bob did 63 Christmases ago. It’s a feeling exemplified by that beautiful war-song lyric, which could have been written by him, or by any of us: “I’ll be home for Christmas/ You can plan on me/ Please have snow and mistletoe/ And presents on the tree/ Christmas Eve will find me/ where the love-light gleams/ I’ll be home for Christmas/ If only in my dreams.”

Tuesday, November 15 and Wednesday, November 16

Freshmen: Today we introduced The Grandparent Project. I will post the handout I gave you, plus my samples, on the blog later this week. Due for Friday is the second and third Marking Periods from Speak with a total of 10 seminar notes. Use your 20 minutes of writing each night this week for that.

CNF: We continued the documentary on information asymmetry.

Basketball: We are at Westminster Tuesday until 5 and Wednesday until 5:30.

Monday, November 7

Freshmen: Today we looked at another good example of a narrative essay. You are to write your own, and consider the following when writing a narrative essay: Provide a conflict and resolution; write about an actual experience; use vivid and precise details; decide who your audience is and what your purpose is. Continue reading 20 minutes each night: The second and third "Marking Periods" from Speak are due on Friday, with five seminar notes on each section for a total of ten.

CNF: Today we began a documentary about information asymmetry. We will conclude it Wednesday.

Basketball: It looks like we are at Westminster Monday-Thursday this week. We will finish at 5:30 each day, with the exception of Tuesday, which has to end at 5.

Friday, November 11

Freshmen: Today we took the Chapter 5 vocab quiz and had a seminar on the First Marking Period of Speak. Your homework is to read the Second and Third Marking Periods. You should have 5 notes per marking period.

CNF: Today we had a seminar on Chapter 2 of Freakonomics.

Tuesday, November 8 and Wednesday, November 9

Freshmen: Today we focused on self-questioning by reading Barry Lopez's The Blue Mound People. Read for 20 minutes each night, making sure you meet the due date for Speak and be sure to complete your seminar prep.

CNF: Today we looked at the cheating data and began reading Chapter 2 of Freakonomics.

Basketball: THe last day of tryouts will be Wednesday, from 2:30 to 5:15. There is no bus up to Sunnyside - you have to get your own ride there.

Monday, November 7

Freshmen: Today we began Speak, by Anderson. Your job is to read for 20 minutes Monday-Thursday, and during that time to finish "The First Marking Period" (approximately 30 pages or so). On Friday we will conduct a Socratic Seminar, and for the seminar you need at least 5 items for class discussion - they may be comments about the text, the characters, events, or issues. Or, they may take the form of a question, and I distributed question stems to help you craft good questions for discussion. Also due Friday is vocab chapter 5.

CNF: Today we focused on figuring out the story the data we collect on cheating tells.

Basketball: Tryouts Monday and Tuesday, 3-5.

Friday, November 4

Freshmen: Today we focused on visualizing while reading. Remember, you need a copy of Speak for next week, and due Friday is proof of submission to an outside publisher of your essay. Also, I bet we have vocab due next week, but check the blog to be sure.

CNF: Today we focused on behaving like economists and looking at the story revealed by the data of our cheating survey.

Basketball: Tryouts are Monday and Tuesday from 3-5.

Thursday, November 3

Freshmen: Today we focused on making connections as we read. Do this during your 20 minutes of reading homework tonight. Due by Friday, 8 AM is your essay to turnitin.com. Have a copy of Speak by Monday; show proof of submission to some publisher by next Friday.

CNF: Today we concluded a documentary. We will interpret our data on cheating tomorrow.

Basketball: We are having a meeting regarding tryouts today followed by open gym. Tryouts are Monday and Tuesday from 3-5 at Sunnyside.

Tuesday, November 1 or Wednesday, November 2

Freshmen: Today we talked about eye fixations and schema. As you read for 20 minutes Tuesday and Wednesday, be aware of these things. Due Friday is your essay; due one week later is proof of submission of it to a publisher.

CNF: Today we began another documentary about cheating.