"I Too, Sing America"

Follow the link to the controversial, and highly disturbing "Willie Lynch Letter" (which has been the subject of conspiracy theories, as well as seriously studied). Because we discussed slave narratives and are now discussing the consequences of slavery through Reconstruction, Social Realism (via Booker T. Washington and W.E.B. Dubois), and our visual analysis of "The Great Debaters," I thought that you might find it interesting to read the text. Please know that reading the text is optional. To add to the historical context of our classroom, feel free to peruse the following documents: Consider pathos and audience, writers purpose, and logical fallacies. I will not test you on this, but I do think these are texts that you should be aware of. Consider this supplementary review for the Rhetorical Triangle. I will remove the Willie Lynch Letter on Sunday.

P.S. All study guide packets are due Tuesday!!!! :-)

"I, Too, Sing America": Langston Hughes

Midterm Assessment: What You Should Know

Literary Time Periods: Please know the dates as well (look them up or refer back to the links that I had you post)
Pre-Colonial (Think Indian Creation Stories)
Colonial (Think Cabeza de Vaca and Columbus)
Puritan Era (Anne Bradstreet and Jonathan Edwards)
Nationalism (Jefferson)
Romanticism (Hawthorne)
Transcendentalism (Emerson and Thoreau)
Slave Narrative (Douglass, Jacobs)
Anti-Transcendentalism/American Gothic (Poe/Hawthorne)
Realism (Chopin, Gilman, Cahan, Washington, DuBois, Truth)

Ideaology
Cult of True Womanhood
One-drop Rule
Basic premise behind Reconstruction
The Rhetorical Triangle: Ethos, pathos, and logos. How they relate to author, audience and context
The City on the Hill

Fiction:
"Desiree's Baby"
"The Story of an Hour"
"A Sweatshop Romance"
"The Pit and Pendulum"
"The Fall of the House of Usher"
"The Masque of the Red Death"
"The Yellow Wallpaper"
Scarlet Letter

Non-Fiction
"The Atlanta Exposition"
The Souls of Black Folk chapter 1 and 3
"Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God"
"Learning to Read and Write"
"Aren't I a Woman"/ "Ain't I a Woman"
Narrative of Frederick Douglass ch. 1
Incidents in the Lifs of a Slave Girl: chapters 1, 7
"The Gettysburg Address"
"The Declaration of Independence"

Poetry
"To My Dear and Loving Husband"

Welcome to the last few days of the semester

Today in class you will receive several review packets. One will be short answer (Do not be vague with your answers: you will do yourself a disservice if you do...and you won't get the answer right), one will be a grammar that covers everything except the sentence parts and types (you will get that tomorrow (Thursday)), and one will be ACT prep...The ACT prep packet will prepare you for the reading passages that I give in relation to the non-fiction that we covered. Which brings me to my next point: You will receive your non-fiction packet in class tomorrow.

Please know that these packets are worth a total of 150 pts. You have to do them and do them correctly. Go above and beyond. This is not an exercise in "if I did it, then I get credit". Do your best and you'll be totally prepared for the exam.

All packets are due Tuesday :-)

I'm sorry 2nd Period...

Here's the homework that you needed to do:

• Choose an article from The New Yorker, The New York Times, or The Washington Post. These articles should be at least two pages long.
• Choose any two page response that you've written from Blogger. Then compare each article according to the following items:
• Total number of words
• Total number of sentences
• Longest sentence (number of words)
• Shortest sentence (number of words)
• Average sentence length
• Percentage of sentences with more than ten words over the average
• Number of sentences with more than five words below the average
• Percentage of sentences with more than five words below the average
• Paragraph length: Longest paragraph (#of sentences), shortest paragraph (# of sentences), average paragraph length (# of sentences)

TONIGHT'S HOMEWORK: PARAPHRASE 3-5 SONG LYRICS FROM THE SONG SHEET (REWRITE EACH LINE IN YOUR OWN WORDS)...THEN, IN A SHORT PARAGRAPH FOR EACH SONG THAT YOU PARAPHRASED, EXPLAIN HOW, EVEN THOUGH YOU KEPT THE 'MEANING', YOU'VE CHANGED THE TONE, INTERPRETATION, ETC.