AP Language and Compostion

Your blogs for the last three weeks will be assesed on a three point scale in the following categories:

Consistency

Development

Application of Class Themes

Friday Creative Writing

http://owl.english.purdue.edu/owl/resource/573/03/

Homework 2.25.08 - 2.29.08 Pre AP 10th Grade ELA

Monday
Read sections 1-15 of Epicetetus' The Handbook and write one blog entry.

Tuesday
Please remember to bring in your persuasive essay drafts.
Read sections 16-30 of Epictetus' The Handbook and write one blog entry.

Wednesday
Revise your essay based on today's lesson for next Wednesday.
Finish Epictetus' The Handbook and write one blog entry.

Thursday
Read Part I of The Waste Land. After completing your reading, listen to T. S. Eliot read the poem. How does his reading differ from yours? What does he accent? What does he enjamb?

Friday
Finish The Waste Land this weekend. This in fact the largest reading assignment we've had thus far and should be treated as such. I would like to see an extremely focused and detailed blog entry about this poem.

Homework 2.25.08-2.29.08 Senior English

Monday
Read Part Two, Chapter Four and write a blog entry.
See "Killing An Arab" video:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BD1uGPkxQfA

Tuesday
Finish The Stranger and write a final blog entry about the entire novel.
Remember that your drafts will be due tomorrow.

Wednesday
Read sections 1-15 of The Handbook and write one blog entry.

Thursday
Read sections 16-30. Be sure to make at least one connection with The Stranger if you haven't already.
*There will be a reading quiz on Friday. Also, bring in your copies of The Stranger to return.

Friday
In preparation for next Friday's in class compartive essay explain a few connections you've made between the film and our reading. You may want to refer to wikipedia or imdb for directors' names, etc.

Pre AP 10th Grade ELA

Homework 2.18.08 - 2.22.08

Monday
Read pages 119-136 and write one blog entry.


Tuesday
Read pages 136-153 and write one blog entry.

Wednesday
Revise your persuasive essay based on your partner's criticisms.

Thursday
Read pages 154-182 and write one blog entry.

Friday
Read page 182-to end and write one blog entry. Include details from:
http://www.time.com/time/arts/article/0,8599,1609650,00.html

Senior English 2.18.08 - 2.22.08

Monday
Read Part One, Chapter Six and write one reading blog entry.

Tuesday
Read Part Two, Chapter One and write one reading blog entry.

Wednesday
Revise your personal essay draft based on your partners' critcism for next Wednesday.

Thursday
Read Part Two, Chapter Two and write one reading blog entry.

Friday
Read Part Two, Chapter Three and write one reading blog entry. Be sure to mention today's film in regards to the novel.

Senior English

All Seniors should comment on this e-mail leaving me their full name.

Reading Blog Rubric

The reading blog rubric can be found at:

http://mrtangenenglish.blogspot.com/2007/08/what-do-these-numbers-mean.html

Valentine's Day Commentary

I thought this blog was pertinent to today's flurry of roses and chocolate:
http://freakonomics.blogs.nytimes.com/2008/02/14/the-macroeconomics-of-love-a-valentines-day-analysis/

Creative Writing Elective

Please respond with commentary. Be sure to include the genre in which you write in and your name.

What is a reading blog?

All of my classes should read this blog before continuing. Post any questions you may have.

Reading to Blog

What’s more important the book or our interpretations of the book? Can there be a book without there being interpretation? We’ll be able to answer some of those questions after we’ve recorded the history of our relationships with our books. In order to preserve paper and promote our communication with the academic world outside of CNG, we’ll be keep blogs about the books we read.You will write you own blogs, and respond to your blogs as prescribed by your weekly homework sheet.

You should not approach each blog the same way. With variety comes varied thought; therefore, I propose focusing on different topics and using different approaches in each entry. Here are some possibilities:

- Respond to the text personallyI never had my house blown down by a wolf, but I did have felt loss. For example, I once abandoned my favorite apartment. I left most of my furniture there, some clothes, even a television!

- Connect text to another book, a film, work of art, a comic or any other creation.The Three Little Pigs reminds me of The Matrix. When the Wolf “huffed and puffed and blew his house down” he acted just as Morpheus did for Reeve’s character. Suddenly, Reeves was without the security he once felt.

- Ask questions to later answerWhat might the grandmother represent?Why would the Wolf want to blow down the houses?How might I write a better ending?I would then maybe answer these questions in later blogs.You may use any combination of these, or you can write your own type of entries. Let your reading guide your entries.

You will be assessed using the a rubric to be posted on my blog. I look forward to reading your responses.

12th Grade English Homework 2.11.08 - 2.15.08

12th Grade English Homework 2.11.08 - 2.15.08


Monday
Read Part One, Chapter Two and write one reading blog entry.

Tuesday
Read Part One, Chapter Three and write one reading blog entry.

Wednesday
Complete your personal essay draft for next Wednesday.

Thursday
Read Part One, Chapter Four and write one reading blog entry.

Friday
Read Part One, Chapter Five and write one reading blog entry.

Pre AP ELA 10th Grade Homework

2.11.08 - 2.15.08

Monday
Read pages 23-51 and write one reading blog entry.


Tuesday
Read pages 52-71 and write one reading blog entry.

Wednesday
Complete your first draft of your persuasive essay for next Wednesday with imaginary sources.

Thursday
Read pages 71-96 and write one blog entry.

Friday
Read pages 96-119 and write one reading blog entry. Be sure to mention the following interview with Vonnegut in your entry http://wiredforbooks.org/kurtvonnegut/

AP Language and Composition

As promised the following is a list of weekly tasks due on the Friday of every week:

read and respond to in a formal letter to an op-ed at www.nyt.com

read and respond in a reading memoir to one short story from www.newyorker.com

listen to one speech from http://www.americanretoric.com/ post you reaction

Each week you want to try to relate the themes from class in your responses. Post all responses on your blog.

You will be graded based on your consistency and ability to link the ideas together.

What is a blog?

Today we'll learn what a blog is.

The word derives from web log, that evolved into the word blog.

This review taken from an article in the New York Book Review explains some of the most recent ideas about blogs. Read the article, then answer the questions posted below A-E on a new document from Microsoft Word.


Volume 55, Number 2 · February 14, 2008
Blogs
By Sarah Boxer
Two years ago, I was given a dreadful idea for a book: create an anthology of blogs. It could not be done, I was sure. Books are tight. Blogs are reckless. Books are slow. Blogs are fast. Books ask you to stay between their covers. Blogs invite you to stray. Books fret over copyright and libel. Blogs grab whatever they want with impunity —news, gossip, pictures, videos. Making a book out of bloggy material, if it could be done at all, would kill it, wouldn't it?[1]
A blog, for those who don't know, is a journal or log that appears on a Web site. It is written on line, read on line, and updated on line. It's there for anyone with an Internet connection to see and (in many cases) comment on. The entries, or posts, are organized in reverse chronological order, like a pile of unread mail, with the newest posts on top and the older stuff on the bottom. Some blogs resemble on-line magazines, complete with graphics, sidebars, and captioned photos. Others just have the name of the blog at the top and the dated entries under it. You can find blogs by doing a regular Google search for the blog name (if you know it) or by doing a Google Blog search using keywords.
The word "blog" is a portmanteau term for Web log or Weblog. In 1997 Jorn Barger, the keeper of Robot Wisdom, a Web site full of writings about James Joyce, artificial intelligence, and Judaism as racism (he's reputedly a racist himself), coined the word "Weblog." In 1999 Peter Merholz, the author of a Weblog called Peterme, split it in two like this—"We blog"— creating a word that could serve as either noun or verb. "Blog" was born.
Today there are, by one count, more than 100 million blogs in the world, with about 15 million of them active. (In Japan neglected or abandoned blogs are called ishikoro, pebbles.) There are political blogs, confessional blogs, gossip blogs, sex blogs, mommy blogs, science blogs, soldier blogs, gadget blogs, fiction blogs, video blogs, photo blogs, and cartoon blogs, to name a few. Some people blog alone and some in groups. Every self-respecting newspaper and magazine has some reporters and critics blogging, including The New York Times, The Atlantic, and The New Yorker.
Every sport, every war, every hurricane brings out a crop of bloggers, who often outdo the mainstream media in timeliness, geographic reach, insider information, and obsessive detail. You can read about the Iraq war from Iraqi bloggers, from American soldiers (often censored now), or from scholars like Juan Cole, whose blog, Informed Comment, summarizes, analyzes, and translates news from the front. For opera, to take another example, you have Parterre Box, which is kind of campy, or Sieglinde's Diaries and My Favorite Intermissions, written by frequent Met-goers, or Opera Chic, a Milan-based blog focused on La Scala (which followed in great detail the scandal of Roberto Alagna's walkout during Aida a year ago). And that doesn't begin to cover it.
With such riches to choose from, you might think it would be a snap to put a bunch of blogs into a book and call it an anthology. And you would be wrong. The trouble? Links—those bits of highlighted text that you click on to be transported to another blog or another Web site. (Links are the Web equivalent of footnotes, except that they take you directly to the source.) It's not only that the links are hard to transpose into print. It's that the whole culture of linking—composing on the fly, grabbing and posting whatever you like, making weird, unexplained connections and references— doesn't sit happily in a book. Yes, I'm talking about bloggy writing itself.
Is there really such a thing? A growing stack of books has pondered the effects of blogs and bloggers on culture (We've Got Blog and Against the Machine), on democracy (Republic .com 2.0), on politics (Blogwars), on privacy (The Future of Reputation), on media (Blog: Understanding the Information Reformation and We're All Journalists Now), on professionalism (The Cult of the Amateur), on business (Naked Conversations), and on all of the above (Blog!). But what about the effect of blogs on language?
Are they a new literary genre? Do they have their own conceits, forms, and rules? Do they have an essence?
Reading blogs, it's pretty clear, is not like reading a newspaper article or a book. Blog readers jump around. They follow links. They move from blogs to news clips to videos on YouTube, and they do it more easily than you can turn a newspaper page. They are always getting carried away—somewhere. Bloggers thrive on fragmented attention and dole it out too—one-liners, samples of songs, summary news, and summary judgments. Sometimes they don't even stop to punctuate. And if they can't put quite the right inflection on a sentence, they'll often use an OMG (Oh my god!) or an emoticon, e.g., a smiley face :-) or a wink ;-) or a frown :-( instead of words. (Tilt your head to the left to see the emoticons here.)
Many bloggers really don't write much at all. They are more like impresarios, curators, or editors, picking and choosing things they find on line, occasionally slapping on a funny headline or adding a snarky (read: snotty and catty) comment. Some days, the only original writing you see on a blog is the equivalent of "Read this.... Take a look.... But, seriously, this is lame.... Can you believe this?"
Consider these two quite unrelated early-morning posts on December 5 from Instapundit, a well-known political blog operated by Glenn Reynolds, a law professor at the University of Tennessee:
HUCKABEEING AND NOTHINGNESS: Great title.
posted at 07:28 AM
by Glenn Reynolds
ALCEE HASTINGS resigns from Intel committee. That seems like a good thing, though Hastings disagrees:
In an interview with Congressional Quarterly in April, Hastings expressed some anger at "Democrats in high places" who made an issue—during his bid for the chairmanship —of the fact that he was impeached and removed from office as a federal judge in 1989 on corruption and perjury charges.
Yeah, can you believe they'd be so uptight?
posted at 07:21 AM
by Glenn Reynolds
The items are short and elliptical— teasers. To see what they are about you click on the links. Here, clicking on the highlighted words "AND NOTHINGNESS" whisks you to a blog post by John Podhoretz on the Web site of Commentary magazine with the title "Huckabeeing and Nothingness"; clicking on "resigns from Intel committee" brings you to an article about Hastings quitting the House Intelligence Committee that was posted on CQ Today, the daily news Web site of Congressional Quarterly. Following links is like putting on 3-D glasses. Too bad there is no equivalent in print.
Political blogs are among the trickiest to capture in a book because they tend to rely heavily on links and ephemeral information. But even blogs that have few or no links still show the imprint of the Web, its associative ethos, and its obsession with connection—the stink of the link. Blogs are porous to the world of texts and facts and opinions on line. (And this is probably as close as I can come to defining an essence of blog writing.)
Bloggers assume that if you're reading them, you're one of their friends, or at least in on the gossip, the joke, or the names they drop. They often begin their posts mid-thought or mid-rant—in medias craze. They don't care if they leave you in the dust. They're not responsible for your education. Bloggers, as Mark Liberman, one of the founders of the blog called Language Log, once noted, are like Plato. :-) The unspoken message is: Hey, I'm here talking with my buddies. Keep up with me or don't. It's up to you. Here is the beginning of Plato's Republic:
I went down yesterday to the Peiraeus with Glaucon, the son of Ariston, to pay my devotions to the Goddess, and also because I wished to see how they would conduct the festival since this was its inauguration.
Wait a second! Who is Ariston? What Goddess? What festival?
And here, for comparison's sake, is a passage from Julia {Here Be Hippogriffs}, a blog about motherhood and infertility:
Having left Steve to his own devices for the past three days I am being heavily pressured to abandon the internet (you! he wants me to abandon you!) and come downstairs to watch SG-1 with him....
So this will have to be quick. Vite! Aprisa aprisa!
I went to Blogher. It was rather fun and rather ridiculous and I am quite glad I went although I do not know if I would ever go again. One thing of note for my infertile blogging friends: DO NOT EVEN THINK ABOUT IT. Do not go. Do not ever ever go to Blogher.
Huh? Who's Steve? What's Blogher? A blog? (No.) A mothers' club? (No.) A blogging conference? (Yes.)
You get the point. Bloggers breeze through places, people, texts, and blogs that you might or might not know without providing any helpful identification. They figure that even if they don't provide you with links you can get all the background you need by Googling unfamiliar terms, clicking through Wikipedia (the collaborative on-line encyclopedia) or searching their blog's archives.
The very tone of most blogs—reactive, punchy, conversational, knowing, and free-associative—is predicated on linkiness and infused with it. And that's no accident. Once upon a time blogs were nothing but links with bits of commentary.
Although blogging has precedents going back to the early 1980s—on-line newsgroups, on-line diaries, and the "What's New" sections of personal homepages—blogging as we know it (according to Rebecca Blood's essay in We've Got Blog) began gathering steam around 1998. That was when a number of people began using their Web sites to record and to link to the new sites they had discovered. These early bloggers didn't always offer much commentary. What they did do was offer place names and coordinates on the Web—like a ship's log. They provided, Blood notes, "a valuable filtering function for their readers." They "pre-surfed" the Web.
That small, cozy world exploded in 1999, the year that a handful of build-your-own-web-log tools for setting up blogs popped up on the Internet— LiveJournal, Diaryland, and, most importantly, Blogger, a free blogging tool courtesy of Pyra Labs. After that anyone with a computer and Internet access could start a blog. You'd simply go to a service like Blogger (now owned by Google) or, in later years, to a social networking site like MySpace. Then you'd follow the instructions: choose a name for your blog, consider how much to reveal on the "About Me" page, decide whether to allow comments from readers, and pick a template—including the layout, font, and background screen.
At the beginning of 1999 there were a few dozen blogs, Blood reports. By the end of the year there were thousands, and it was impossible for anyone to keep up. At the end of 2003 there were two million blogs and the number was doubling every five months. In early 2006 Technorati, a search engine that tracks blogs, counted 27 million. In late 2007, the count passed 100 million. (The largest number of blog posts, some 37 percent, are now in Japanese, according to a recent Washington Post article by Blaine Harden, and most of these are polite and self-effacing—"karaoke for shy people." Thirty-six percent of posts are in English, and most of them are the opposite of polite and self-effacing.)
When the blog boom came, the tone of the blogosphere began to shift. A lot of the new blogs—though certainly not all of them—weren't so much filters for the Web as vents for opinion and self-revelation. Instead of figuring out ways to serve up good fresh finds, many of the new bloggers were fixated on getting found. So the very significance of linking began to change. The links that had once mattered were the ones you offered on your blog, the so-called outbound links pointing to other sites. Now the links that mattered most—and still do—are those on other blogs pointing toward your blog, the so-called inbound links. Those are the ones that blog-trackers like Technorati count. They are the measure of fame.
Now that fame and links are one and the same, there are bloggers out there who will do practically anything— start rumors, tell lies, pick fights, create fake personas, and post embarrassing videos—to get noticed and linked to. They are, in the parlance of the blogosphere, "link whores." And those who succeed are blog celebrities, or "blogebrities."
One of the surest ways to hoist your blog to the top of the charts is to bring down a big-time politician or journalist. (Bloggers who constantly dog the mainstream media, or MSM, have been dubbed the Pajamahadeen.) In 2004 the blogs Little Green Footballs and Power Line helped set Rathergate in motion when they spread the allegation that the memos Dan Rather presented on 60 Minutes II about President George W. Bush's Air National Guard duty were fakes. (Since then, a CBS panel investigating the matter has failed to prove that Rather's account of Bush's military career was substantially wrong,[2] and Rather has pressed a suit against CBS for "wrongful dismissal.") In 2006 Little Green Footballs scored another hit by pointing out that a Reuters photograph of an Israeli air strike had been doctored to make the smoke plumes over Lebanon larger and darker. In 2004 many right-wing blogs helped the Swift Boat Veterans sink John Kerry's bid for the presidency. In 2002 it was bloggers like Joshua Micah Marshall of Talking Points Memo and Atrios (a pseudonym) of Eschaton who first publicized Trent Lott's racist remarks at Strom Thurmond's 100th birthday party, leading to Lott's resignation as Senate majority leader.
BOOKS MENTIONED IN THIS ARTICLE
We've Got Blog: How Weblogs Are Changing Our Culture
compiled and edited by John Rodzvilla, with an introduction by Rebecca Blood
Basic Books, 242 pp., $20.00
Against the Machine: Being Human in the Age of the Electronic Mob
by Lee Siegel
Spiegel and Grau, 182 pp., $22.95
Republic.com 2.0
by Cass R. Sunstein
Princeton University Press, 251 pp., $24.95
Blogwars
by David D. Perlmutter
Oxford University Press, 235 pp., $24.95
The Future of Reputation: Gossip, Rumor, and Privacy on the Internet
by Daniel J. Solove
Yale University Press, 247 pp., $24.00
We're All Journalists Now: The Transformation of the Press and Reshaping of the Lawin the Internet Age
by Scott Gant
Free Press, 240 pp., $26.00
Blog: Understanding the Information Reformation That's Changing Your World
by Hugh Hewitt
Nelson Books, 225 pp., $14.99 (paper)
The Cult of the Amateur: How Today's Internet Is Killing Our Culture
by Andrew Keen
Doubleday/Currency, 228 pp., $22.95
Naked Conversations: How Blogs Are Changing the Way Businesses Talk with Customers
by Robert Scoble and Shel Israel, foreword by Tom Peters
Wiley, 252 pp., $24.95
Blog! How the Newest Media Revolution Is Changing Politics, Business, and Culture
by David Kline and Dan Burstein
CDS Books, 402 pp., $24.95

A. What is the difference between a blog and a book?
B. How have blogs changes recently?
C. Why might you read a blog?
D. Is there reason to doubt the objectivity of a blog? Why? Why not?
E. If you kept your own blog, what would you title it?

Getting Started

Reading to Blog

What’s more important the book or our interpretations of the book? Can there be a book without there being interpretation? We’ll be able to answer some of those questions after we’ve recorded the history of our relationships with our books. In order to preserve paper and promote our communication with the academic world outside of CNG, we’ll be keep blogs about the books we read.

You will write you own blogs, and respond to your blogs as prescribed by your weekly homework sheet. You should not approach each blog the same way. With variety comes varied thought; therefore, I propose focusing on different topics and using different approaches in each entry. Here are some possibilities:

- Respond to the text personally

I never had my house blown down by a wolf, but I did have felt loss. For example, I once abandoned my favorite apartment. I left most of my furniture there, some clothes, even a television!

- Connect text to another book, a film, work of art, a comic or any other creation.The Three Little Pigs reminds me of The Matrix. When the Wolf “huffed and puffed and blew his house down” he acted just as Morpheus did for Reeve’s character. Suddenly, Reeves was without the security he once felt.

- Ask questions to later answerWhat might the grandmother represent?Why would the Wolf want to blow down the houses?How might I write a better ending?

I would then maybe answer these questions in later blogs.

You may use any combination of these, or you can write your own type of entries. Let your reading guide your entries.

You will be assessed using the a rubric to be posted on my blog.

I look forward to reading your responses.