ENGLISH 9B  

In their Myths from Around the World unit, students are working on developing better reading comprehension, learning new word attack strategies, improving paragraph writing, learning how to respond intelligently and personally to  myths, learning to apply myths and legends' themes to their own life, and  developing a stronger understanding of the elements of a myth. They are now concentrating on Greek mythology, beginning with an understanding of the hiearchy of the Greek gods. Then they move on to different well-known myths and moving to the Odyssey, which is a mixture of history, legend , and mythology.   In technology and research, they are learning how to develop a database of information about a topic. In extending their writing, they are moving from the development of a strong paragraph full of details supporting an idea to a longer essay of over 5 paragraphs which fully develops 4-5 main ideas centering around a thesis statement about the role a  god or godess played in Greek mythology.

ENGLISH 10 B

Students just completed a wonderful unit on poetry. In this unit they developed a working vocabulary of devices poets use to convey their feelings and ideas about a topic.  They still have trouble finding the main idea of more complex poems, but they have vastly improved over the beginning of the unit.  They enjoy reading aloud, interpreting, dissecting the the poem.  Some dabbled in writing poems.  On Shakespeare's birthday (April 23) they spend the hour looking at five of his sonnets, using their new skills to interpret, dissect, and read interpretively one of his sonnets in front of the class. Impressive they were. Their final unit is the a combination of 5 different sentence-building chapters. The goal of this unit is to move their writing and editing skills to or beyond the 10th grade level. Not as exciting as poetry or novels, but a necessary chore.

Stories for All Time:

Students  just finshed Steinbeck's Of Mice and Men, the beloved novella about migrant workers Lennie, a mentally challenged yet big and strong adult,  and George, a quick-witted, honest man, who travel the ranches,  working to save enough money to buy a small farm so that Lennie can live  out the rest of his life in peace, without fear of "bein' bad again!"

They have now moved on to a grizzly look at what Golding feels happens when a society loses its sense of law and order, disgards the basic rules of civilization.  Young boys from a private school, flying to a school outing,  crash on a deserted island--no adults to help supervise, organize, or command civilized behavior.  Sounds like fun to the children--at first. Until...all hell breaks loose--literally! 

As they get further into the novel, students are getting "uncomfortable" with the behavior and attitude changes of some of the characters. This is Golding's plan for his readers.  To make them uncomfortable about the idea of what happens when people or whole societies DO NOT FOLLOW THE RULES OF CIVILIZED BEHAVIOR.  This leads to terror..to terrorism. Hmmmmmmm...sound familiar?