Getting Into "Speak"

Mkay here was class:

1) Students swapped their copies of the Brainwashing/Music Industry articles (see Friday's post), and answered each other's Bloom's I-VI questions.

1.5) Some classes, but not all, insisted on discussing the ramifications of this article. Lots of good points arose organically, and I can't record them all here. Two of the best (in my opinion) were these:

• This article's conclusion is flawed: it ends with the idea that, through repeated listens to "bad" pop music, the audience will eventually figure out just how bad it is. This runs in direct opposition the the thesis of the rest of the piece: that listening to bad songs more frequently encourages audiences to like it.
• "Bad" is a subjective (a.k.a. "biased") statement. Especially given that the author at no point gives an example of a "good" song.

Freshmen handed this document in.

Then, they took notes on a handy piece of English called the Plot Diagram (this was page #2 in the NOTES composition notebook):

Having equipped students with the generalities of this framework, we then applied this knowledge to Speak by mapping the novel's details across a blank one. The blank document can be found here.

HW for Tues:

• Bring Speak to class (if possible)
• Review the First Marking Period. Tomorrow, we're going to focus on setting.