It is important that you use your time in class wisely and productively. Be sure to "read and study" the literary analysis rubric carefully and "pay attention to the details--all of them!" As with our narrative paragraphs. Watch the video: it should help, and it can't hurt.

If you want immediate feedback, use the basic rubric on Quip to enter your text. It will make it easier for me and your classmates to give you helpful feedback outside of class. Here is a link to the Quip Rubric. It does not have all the directions, so use the full rubric to see the details.

You can also see that there is now a chatbox on my blog. Feel free to use the chatbox, but use it appropriately (not just for random conversations. You must use full sentences punctuated as correctly as you can, and you must sign in using your First name first name Last name initial: e.g. Owen J. If you see an inappropriate post  please email me immediately . Remember: there is no such thing as privacy on the web! A student was once suspended from school for using the chatbox to anonymously post derogatory comments.  [I'm speaking in my "firm" voice.]

You are also welcome to put it on your blog on the top right of your sidebar. Here is the embed code. Notice my nifty use of the block quote!

Have a good and productive class session. Keep talking to a minimum and writing to a maximum.

This week, we are going to use our four class periods to learn and practice how to create insightful, unified, and well-crafted literary analysis paragraphs. 

Your homework each night is to read and blog--at least fifteen minutes spent on each.

The Class Periods: It is a pretty simple formula for a week's work in the classroom, but I want to make sure we use our class time wisely, as learning how to craft analysis paragraphs is a critical skill that you will need to use time and again throughout the next eight years of life in high school and college--and more than likely through your whole life.

We will be using the Literary Analysis Paragraph Rubric that can be downloaded from the sidebar of this blog or found under the resources tab on The Crafted Word website. Our goal is to create two paragraphs, each of which "explicates" (which means to explain in detail) a major theme evident in the first sixteen chapters of Tom Sawyer.

Homework: Each night you will be required to read a chapter from Tom Sawyer and write a brief (one paragraph) reading response posted to your Tom Sawyer and Journal categories that tries to relate something that happened in the chapter to something that has happened in your life--or which is relevant to life today.

I will explain everything in class on Monday, and we will get cracking right away.

How lucky to start the week on a C day because now you have until tomorrow to post all of your work.

At this point, you "must" have your blog organized with the correct categories and with all your posts saved in the correct categories. 

We only have three class meetings this week.

Tuesday: In class reading, annotation and discussion of Chapter 13 
Homework: Read and annotate Chapter 14

Wednesday: Write Reading Journal for chapters 11 - 14
Homework: Read and Annotate Chapter 15

Friday: Discussion/reading Chapter 16
Homework: 

1. Fitz-Style Journal Entry
   
2. Read & Annotate Chapter 16
3. Comment.

NEW: On the sidebar is a link to a Homework Checklist that you can use to "check" off assignments you have completed. 

I am--and always have been--committed to allowing any student of mine to be a writer who is free to follow the arc of his or her own genius, and so this is an important reason why I ask you to write "blog entries" of your own choosing. It is a great sua-sponte moment to take this freedom and add content to your "portfolio" that reflects your passion and/or expertise in a certain area. These blog posts should be energizing experiences for you and not another "assignment" that drags you down into some dark hole of malcontent.

There is no formula or rubric for your independent posts aside from "try." Try to create something in line with your interests; try to create something interesting to your audience, and try to start before the guillotine of a deadline starts to crash down.

If you are totally lost for ideas, check out this post.

If you choose to stay lost, toughen up, for you are choosing a rocky trail though life.

I am doing my best to make your workload manageable, but it is up to you to make it memorable.

It's time to add some "categories" to your posts. Watch this "how to" video and add the following categories to your side bar. Go back to your old entries and make sure they are in multiple categories if you want Journal credit, to

Add:

1. Assignments
2. Journal
3. Tom Sawyer
4. Paragraphs

Wednesday: Be sure to have all of your work from last week posted.
*In-class Socratic discussion on the major themes in Tom Sawyer, chapters 7-8

Thursday:  Post Reading Journal for chapters 1-8
*In-class: read chapters 9-10

Friday: Post reading Journal for chapters 9-10
*In-class:Tom Sawyer Portfolio Review

Weekend: Read Chapters 11-12

Journal Entries: Write at least two more entries about anything in any style and post before class on Tuesday.

      I remember my first year teaching at Fenn—and it was really my first stint as a true worker with responsibilities outside of what I already had in my wheelhouse—and on this day, some twenty something years ago, I could hardly move. Every Columbus Day weekend for as long as I could remember we (gangs of friends and I) would head up to Stinson Lake in New Hampshire where my family had a cottage, and I had my usual agenda of mountain climbing, fishing, or even a last sail on our Sunfish around the amazingly pristine waters on my bucket list for those three days.

But this weekend came to be known as the "weekend of the couch."

All I seemed to be able to do was sleep. Denise, who was not yet my fiancé, and our pack of friends, seemed to have a ball, but all I could do was wave goodbye or say, “I’ll catch up with you later…” But I never did. I put my head back down and slept, literally, for three days. The mental wear and tear of being a teacher had caught me off guard, for somehow the seemingly mundane lists of things to do never seemed to cease—and I was the shop teacher! I think I would have melted or imploded if I was trying to do what I almost naturally do now. A terse letter then from a parent would have me agonizing over a politely worded response. A student upset with a grade, or a mean friend or teacher, would have me scouring a book of psychology for a solution.

This new job was not as straightforward as singing four hours of songs in a pub, cutting down eight cord of wood, sailing through a storm, setting stones or banging nails in winter cold, finding myself alone and broke in some distant corner of the world—all of which had been a big part of my life until that first fall of teaching—and so I laid myself down to rest as I had never done before, all because being a shop teacher was the toughest job I had ever tried to tackle. That endless stream of enthused boys aged nine to fifteen had done what no other job had ever done: exhausted me simply because they energized some part of me that must have lay dormant for the entirety of my adult life—and at that time I was thirty-five years old for God’s sake!

But now I am fifty-six and have been teaching ever since, more writing and reading than shop—and it is still as hard and exhausting as ever, but in a different way. Even last night—a Friday night—I stayed up until one in the morning reading and commenting on my student’s blog posts and journal entries. I read reams of essays about Walden and Tom Sawyer. I listened to their podcasts and watched their video’s and tried to pen a few words of real praise for every effort they made over the course of the last week, and it reflects a massive amount of effort on their part, but for me, tired as I was, it was not a big effort that drained me. For me, it was more of a celebration of the joy of being a teacher, and I woke up this morning “psyched” to continue what is now more of a rhythmic cycle in cadence with the seasons, than a Sisyphean effort to push an irregular boulder back up a slaggy, barren mountainside. 

It is in this way because I work in a place that gives me structure and freedom in equal doses. My bosses never hang behind my shoulder and nitpick my constantly evolving curriculum; my parents don’t scrutinize and dissect my motives, and my co-workers laugh with me, bitch with me, and work just as hard at our collective mission. It is by no means a “dream job,” but the school is a place that allows me to dream as deeply as we hope our students dream. Granted, The Fenn School is a rarified community backed up by an enormous cache of accumulated wealth and uncommon worldly success, but when stripped of these trappings every class is simply a group of kids being asked to do what each of us teachers feel he (it is a boy’s school) need to do, and whatever pressure I feel as a teacher is counterbalanced by an academic freedom that deflates that pressure, and I wonder if this is an approach that just works for us or if it is a reality that needs to be—or at least could be—emphasized in every school, regardless of wealth, opportunity or standing.

If each classroom becomes a family, then every teacher will respond in ways that transcend the trivial; if every school becomes a community that pulls together through the thick and thin of the vicissitudes of the year and places trust in teachers and students, then maybe (I’d say probably) the first six weeks of school won’t put anyone on the couch. 

It’s time to climb that mountain with free and joyous motion.  

To help ease (I hope) your mind before our fall break) the following is what needs to be posted on your blog and/or completed before you return. If you have been proactive this week, you should be don with most of this work already. 

But if not...

1. Two Reading Responses: (one should already be posted) The second reading response can focus on anything in chapters 1-6.
2. Two Journal Entries: Post two journal entries 
3. Commenting: By this point in the year, you should have posted at least six times on "each" of your classmate's blogs.
4. Reading: Read through Chapter 8 in Tom Sawyer.

You will have class period on Friday to work on this work, too. Have fun!

Week in Review:

I: Read in Tom Sawyer. Try to read through Chapter Four by Thursday class time.

II: Begin writing first Reading Journal Response of 300-500 words. Post as a Fitz Style entry by Thursday.

III: Thursday and Friday we will read, discuss and write about Tom Sawyer in class. The second reading response is due on Tuesday, October 14th. This can cover anything in Chapters 1-6

IV: Journal Entries: Write at least two more entries about anything in any style and post before class on Tuesday. A podcast--if thoughtful and well made--counts as a journal entry.

Sometimes we read for pleasure; sometimes we read because we have to--and sometimes were read because there is a chance we will reap the rewards of great, classic literature--and The Adventures of Tom Sawyer certainly is a great piece of literature, even if only because it set the stage and planted the seed in a fun and humorous way for the American literature that follows until this day. No writer is free of the influence of Tom Sawyer, even if they never read the book!

Tom Sawyer is a book worth thinking about and a book worth remembering. As you read in iBooks, be sure to highlight words you do not know, to take notes when something "notable" comes up.  Tomorrow in class we will start writing in your reading journals.

For tonight--read to your heart's content, but at least for thirty minutes.

In class, on Tuesday, we will write our first Reading Journal entry.

Your second Reading Response is Due on Tuesday after the long break.

We will read through chapter 6 by Wednesday, October 15th

• Don't forget, too, that you need at least one Fitz-Style journal and one more entry for this week and weekend + comment at least twice more on classmate's blogs