English 9 Class Notes
Objective(s): English 9 students 1) read independently for a sustained period and journaled critically, 2) created level 1 and 2 questions for a visual text, and 3) extended level questions to literary text.
Periods 1 and 3, after SSR today we spent the rest of the period analyzing Automat by Edward Hopper (below). I didn’t expect it to take the period, but the questions you developed were incisive and the discussion they engendered was great.
We reviewed how to generate level 1 and level 2 questions, and defined two words that’ll be terribly important to you as we progress throughout the year: schema and its plural, schemata. Loosely, your schemata are the model or plan of the world that lives in your own head, and we all possess multiple plans that we use to engage the world daily. More specifically, your schemata are your combined (conscious and unconscious) knowledge, ideas, experiences, memories, beliefs, dreams, et cetera, that are specific to you; your schemata are the lenses through which you view the world, the thought-processes through which you encounter the world and according to which you act in the world.
That seems like a lot, and it is. Thankfully we don’t have to think much minute by minute about who we are and what we are and where we are and how we know such things, but we use our schemata all the time, sometimes through our own effort, but more often automatically.
It’ll all become clearer as we progress as long as you have your thinking caps on at all times. (Never expect bottom-shelf from me.)
Remember to check your class page for homework.