January 6-9

Happy New Year!  

Welcome back!  I hope everyone had a wonderful winter break.  I'm excited to begin 2015 continuing our work on the Argument essay and starting a gender-themed unit that will begin with short essays from McGraw Hill and conclude with the novel Their Eyes Were Watching God.  We're moving towards mastery of both the Argument and Synthesis style essays that will be on the AP exam on May 13.  In preparation, the students will be completing example essay questions as a class, as take-home assignments to be uploaded to turnitin.com, and as in-class essays. 

The class will still take quizzes on Fridays, alternating current events with vocabulary quizzes every two weeks.  Students will choose from a list of classic books describing the nature of American life for independent reading (see handout passed out before break and in class on Tuesday), and prepare a dialectical journal in response. 

Here is what we'll tackle this week:

MONDAY:  Enjoy the last day of winter break!

TUESDAY:  Warm-up.  Overview of January, February, March game plan.  Discuss independent reading assignment for the semester with example.  Intro to month-long gender unit.  Male/female list activity.  HW: Read and annotate Margaret Atwood's "The Female Body" essay from McGraw Hill for Wednesday.  Be prepared to discuss whether or not gender-specific toys are appropriate for small children with Atwood's evidence as well as your own to support your position.  

WEDNESDAY:  Discuss "The Female Body" and whether or not gender-specific toys are appropriate for small children with evidence.  Review the different types of evidence we covered back in December and apply to this question.  Look at Argument Essay learning goals worksheet, review. 

THURSDAY:  Argument Focused Learning Targets.  Types of argument prompts, pitfalls to avoid.  Notes: warrants.  Toy debate: revisit fallacies, identify warrants.  HW: Review TheWeek.com for current events quiz tomorrow for Tuesday-Thursday "10 Things You Need To Know Today" articles.  For Monday: read Paul Theroux's "Being a Man" from McGraw Hill on page 219 and come with three pieces of evidence that defend, challenge or qualify Theroux's argument.  

FRIDAY:  Current events quiz based on TheWeek.com's "Ten Things You Need to Know Today" from Tuesday through Thursday of this week.  Receive vocabulary list.  Read opinion article about North Korea and the U.S. response in the latest conflict over "The Interview" movie release and defend/challenge/qualify using your own evidence in a class discussion. HW:  For Monday: read Paul Theroux's "Being a Man" from McGraw Hill on page 219 and come with three piece of evidence that defend, challenge or qualify Theroux's argument. Study vocabulary words for next Friday's quiz.  Work on independent reading dialectical journal.  I'd suggest that you have your independent reading book selected and bought/checked out.  Look over the prompt that you'll respond to in a take-home argument essay.