APELC Class Notes
Objectives: APELCers 1) differentiated levels of critical thinking, and 2) analyzed a painting.
First and third APELCers, today, after some review of culture, text, language, and rhetoric, we moved to cognition and metacognition. I elaborated the importance understanding our own biases and assumptions and thinking critically about the same. I introduced you to Bloom’s cognitive taxonomy, and we discussed the different levels of cognition and how our thinking operates at each level. I also introduced you to levels of questioning, an reading strategy to help sort information, analyze, and evaluate textual messages. Finally, I asked you to make observations about and supply your own questions in an analysis of Edward Hopper’s excellent painting Automat.
Regarding last class and our discussion of the distinctions between human language and animal “speech”, I found these characteristics that humans exhibit in their communicative practices that haven’t been observed measurably or consistently in animals that have demonstrated methods of communicating among themselves. These are several of thirteen listed in one of my linguistics resources; you’re welcome to borrow my book and read more about them, or talk them over in detail with me:
- Interchangeability. Humans can both send and receive messages; certain animals are limited in the communicative roles they may play.
- Feedback. Humans are aware of what they’re transmitting, that is, they can monitor and correct linguistic output.
- Specialization. Human communication serves no other purpose than to communicate and express external and internal realities, whereas animal speech appears to be symptomatic.
- Displacement. Humans are able to refer to events remote in space and time.
- Productivity. Humans can create new messages spontaneously and (potentially) infinitely on any topic at any time.
- Duality of patterning. Humans can combine meaningless to form arbitrary signs; such signs can be recombined into larger meaningful units.
- Tradition. Certain aspects of the system must be transmitted from an experienced user to a learner.
- Learnability. Humans can learn other languages and variants.
- Reflexiveness. Humans can use language to discuss language itself.
Bring the Collins poem I’d scheduled us to work on today to class with you Monday, and please check your class page for further homework details.
I’ll see you next week.
English 9 Class Notes
Objectives: Freshmen 1) identified key features of a map, and 2) drew inferences from map’s features about its content.
Freshmen, you continued looking over the map today in your groups. We discussed the dietary and foraging habits of the people who lived in the area indicated by the map and we discovered a means of figuring their height. We’ll complete the activity next class.
Please remember to bring your school IDs next time so you can check out a book during our visit to the liberry.
APELC Class Notes
Second and fourth period juniors and seniors, please check your peers’ notes from yesterday for objectives and details and please attend the homework on your class page.
See you again Friday.
APELC Class Notes
Objectives: APELCers 1) reviewed definitions of culture; 2) defined language, rhetoric, and text; and 3) identified and explained their own examples of textual signs.
First and third juniors and seniors, today we reviewed the definitions of culture I gave you last class and asked you to copy several other definitions that’ll be important to class. The first was a definition of language, the aspect of culture that’ll be our primary focus of study this year:
Language may be defined as an arbitrary, conventional, symbolic system represented primarily in speech and used by a group of human beings for communication; it is used for mediating personal relations, expressing emotions, and creating artistic forms; all languages, no matter how simple or complex the material culture of their speakers, exhibit systems of roughly equal complexity, ie., there is no such thing as a “primitive” language. (Troike)
Next I gave you Aristotle’s definition of rhetoric, the main use of language we’ll engage, which he defined as “the faculty of observing in any given case the available means of persuasion”, which I clarified further for our purposes:
Analyzing rhetoric involves examining “all the choices involving language that a writer, speaker, reader, or listener might make in a situation so that the text becomes meaningful, purposeful, and effective”, and determining “the specific features of texts, written or spoken, that cause them to be meaningful, purposeful, and effective for readers or listeners in a situation”. (Roskelly and Jolliffe)
Then I offered you two definitions of text, the rhetorical products we’ll analyze over the next four quarters; text “system of signs” (Chandler), and also the message or messages embedded in such a system or (cultural) code (Noth). Finally, I set you to the task of identifying various icons, indices, and symbols in the room or from your own experience.
Put these definitions in your heads; you’ll need to access them often.
We’ll tackle the Hazlitt piece in detail next class. Until then, please check your class page for homework details.
English 9 Class Notes
Objectives: Freshmen 1) identified key features of a map, and 2) drew inferences from map’s features about its content.
Freshmen, on your second day with me, I broke you into groups and presented you with a map and asked you to identify its key features and tell me what those features told you the contents of the map. We didn’t get as far as I’d planned, so we’ll continue next class.
See you then.
APELC Class Notes
Objectives: APELCers 1) analyzed and evaluated writing prompts and student writing samples, and 2) defined culture.
Periods 1, 2, 3, and 4 (wow, that’s a lot of APELC), today we reviewed the free-response prompts and bit of the authentic student writing attached to each. We discussed your own writing and then I offered you the following definitions of culture, which I asked you to copy and consider, as study of culture (through written and other texts) will be our guiding motif for the year:
[Culture is] Behaviour peculiar to Homo sapiens, together with material objects used as an integral part of this behaviour. Thus, culture includes language, ideas, beliefs, customs, codes, institutions, tools, techniques, works of art, rituals, and ceremonies, among other elements. (Encyclopædia Britannica)
Culture is the effort to provide a coherent set of answers to the existential situations that confront all human beings in the passage of their lives. (Daniel Bell qtd. in Daniel Yankelovich)
We’ll talk more about these, language and signs (the primary object of study), and rhetoric (methods of language use) next class. Until then, in light of your new understandings of the prompts, reevaluate your essays from last class. We’ll try to get to it next time.
English 9 Class Notes
Objective: Freshmen wrote an expository essay.
First period ninth graders, welcome to Mr. Girard Online, your class website, one you’ll visit often and come to know well. You ended your second day of high school by writing a five-paragraph, expository essay over a short story or book of your choice that you read in middle school. It was, for all of you I believe, quite an awakening. I reviewed portions of the Course Outline with you, and highlighted certain portions that I felt needed to be emphasized.
Please make sure you read the Course Outline with your parents or guardians very carefully over the weekend, sign the attached Affirmation sheet and return it Monday. Also be prepared with the correct paper, pens, and highlighters I asked you to acquire.
I’m looking forward with each and every one of you this year. See you next week.
APELC Class Notes
Periods 2 and 4 APELCers, you did the same as your first and third period peers yesterday, so please check their notes for objectives and details.
Most Wednesdays and Fridays, your class notes will simply direct you to your colleagues’ notes from the day before; there’s no need for me to write the same thing on different days. But, and all APELCers take note, it’s always worth checking notes for both days because I usually use the odd days’ notes to include or extend ideas that come up in one class that didn’t in previous classes, to add links to resources germane to our class discussion, and/or to post assignment clarifications that need to be addressed.
For example, I need to clarify what I meant when I talked to all four classes about the statement your APELC colleague wrote in her self-assessment. Recall she wrote: “It doesn’t matter what I have to say on [a particular] matter, what matters is what the author says”. I stated that I found it chilling that a reader, an experiencer of text, would so willingly and absolutely relinquish her right to engage a text meaningfully and passively accept what an author or artist, or creator of text, (apparently) has to offer on a particular subject.
Now, I don’t want to leave the impression that an experiencer of text has the ultimate say in what he or she thinks a work means or the message it’s sending, for as I stated, there are many ways to interpret texts, but there certainly wrong ways to do interpret text as well (see what JRR Tolkien, creator of Middle-Earth, had to say about applicability and allegory).
When a reader and author meet in a piece of text, there must necessarily be a negotiation of meaning of the author’s intent and readers’ understanding based on his or her assumptions and biases. We’ll explore this further as we try to find a suitable, reasonable middle-ground between authors and their readers, speakers and their audiences over the course of the year.
Until we meet Monday, have a great weekend.
APELC Class Notes
Objectives: APELCers wrote a rhetorical analysis and an argument.
First and third period juniors and seniors, welcome to Mr. Girard Online, your class website. You completed two timed-writings today, a rhetorical analysis and an argument. The prompts you responded to are typical of what you might encounter in authentic exam setting, and were included in the 2006 and 2007 exams, respectively.
After you completed your task, I highlighted three important ideas you need to know about Advanced Placement English Language and Composition:
- It’s a college-level writing course, in which you’ll focus rhetorical analysis of various non-fiction texts and argument with opportunities for creative non-fiction and research;
- Your individuals goals are to become capable, critical consumers and producers of language by exploring and exercising cultural, moral, philosophical, social, national, religious, psychological, racial, political, ethnic, visual, popular, and other uses (and their consequences) of the former;
- My role is to foster your critical thinking, reading, and writing toward the previous stated goal, not to think for you, or tell you what or how to think about a particular text.
As I wrote to your APELC peers at the beginning of last year, I know that many of you already have preconceived notions about what you might expect in this class and from me during the next four quarters. As I did then, I hope I can confirm the good and explode the bad. Ultimately you’ll have to decide for yourself, but I do look forward to working with and challenging each of you this year.
Remember to review the Course Outline with your parents or guardians and return the attached Affirmation, signed by you both, on Monday along with your completed Data Sheet.
See you next week.