AGENDA:
Animated poetry:
Go to www.loc.gov/poetry/180
Select a poem to "animate" (shorter poems work best).
HMWK: Continue reading Rattlebone ("Roomers" "A Most Serene Girl" "Great War" "Secret Love") for discussion on Mon. Dec. 1--
and work on your study guide for Rattlebone!!
Have a safe and happy Thanksgiving week!
Tuesday, November 25, 2014
Friday, November 21, 2014
Coffeehouse Readings/Mango Street Projects
AGENDA:
WRITE: Writing for Self-Discovery
"My First SOTA Coffeehouse" Nonfiction Reflection
(personal narrative)
Write a one page personal narrative about your experience at the Coffeehouse for your portfolio.
What were your expectations about this event? Any fears about public speaking?
Was the rehearsal classes helpful?
Why did you select the pieces you read?
What did you think about other readers?
What was your overall feeling about the event and how you "performed"?
What did you "discover" about yourself?
DISCUSSION of Coffeehouse Readings
WRITERS CIRCLE: Share vignettes from Mango Street projects
HMWK: READING: Continue reading Rattlebone and work on study guide
WRITE: Writing for Self-Discovery
"My First SOTA Coffeehouse" Nonfiction Reflection
(personal narrative)
Write a one page personal narrative about your experience at the Coffeehouse for your portfolio.
What were your expectations about this event? Any fears about public speaking?
Was the rehearsal classes helpful?
Why did you select the pieces you read?
What did you think about other readers?
What was your overall feeling about the event and how you "performed"?
What did you "discover" about yourself?
DISCUSSION of Coffeehouse Readings
WRITERS CIRCLE: Share vignettes from Mango Street projects
HMWK: READING: Continue reading Rattlebone and work on study guide
Wednesday, November 19, 2014
Monday, November 17, 2014
Bookmaking/Rehearsal for Coffeehouse/Rattlebone
AGENDA:
BELLWORK: Mugshot Paragraphs
Correct the mistakes in each paragraph.
STUDY GUIDE: Rattlebone, Due Tues. Nov. 25
Mirages hovered above undulant highways
and summer stomped his dusty feet,
conjured up sunflowers
that ran wildly through fields of cornsilk.
Giant brown faces with yellow rays
stampeded to pavement edge
and stood cooling their feet in the clay.
Blue racers that slept between slats
of a swinging bridge became Python.
Roused by Amazon and Watusi
they slithered to a rocky cathedral
in the creek bed,
and choirs of cicada droned a fugue
of The Seven-Fold Amen.
When the moon like new silver
rolled on edge across black velvet,
Orion laid down his shield
to play hide-and-seek with lightning bugs.
Children caught his eyes in mason jars,
kept the stars to hold to
and went to seek their fortunes.
DEJA VU
Like a yellow flag, my mind plants
a singpost for itself, a re-vision
of something I've never seen, the re-seeing
of a scene I never wrote. Here it is again,
Soweto. Women walking on a road. Bodies
shaped in angles that hold a three-sided
fury with gnarled hair; slender shadows
whose reappearance could give me the chance
to rewrite my descriptive passages of the corpses
they bear, the blood they wring from their skirts.
As if clairvoyance were a gift, I've been given
the second sight of girls, boys, silhouetted
against a casaba moon, slipping past a gatekeeper
into cliché: thousands dead or missing.
And living is a sending out of moments. That
is the gift. Each must come back in deja vu
like a pod on a bough of the akee-fruit tree,
opening in its time, round with delight or venom.
COAL OIL AND SUGAR, 1954
When the nine o'clock whistle blows
our way, we can smell manure and bacon
from the packing house across the river.
The August night sky leans down for us
to touch. Mamma Hayes braids her hair
on her porch. Down the block somebody
yells, All hid? Next door Georgie, who's
too slow to read and cannot go to school, begs to stay
outside until ten when the street light goes out
and we go to bed thinking of school one sleep away.
Attucks, Wheatley, Douglass--mostly names
of schools we know, Dunbar Annex is ours,
a haven on the second floor of the Agency
where official workers must not be disturbed.
Hear our verses opening the day, reluctantly
at first, God is love. Make a joyful noise...
See us reciting in single file, eight rows
of faces, brown and artless as sunflowers:
.....Between the dark and the daylight,
.....When the night is beginning to lower,
our skinny stalks rooted to this soil
of English, arithmetic, geography.
We lift our voices and sing--not the dirges
yet, not the curses we will learn before
we sing love songs again. Black still verges
on the profane, the color of a bad word for female
dogs; for weapons, loaded snowballs in February,
on our sleds all day, a dose of coal oil and sugar
down our throats to ward off whooping cough. With
pudding and juniper tea our evenings boil over
like a pot on the back burner whose steam
rises and stains the wallpaper in shapes we dream
about. We cannot know that when we turn this page,
a schoolboy face with a bullet hole, the murdered
face of Emmet Till, will find those shapes.
The smooth, tied hands with mud from the bottom
of the river will worry our dreams like blood
on snow. We lift our voices and sing. Negro
History Week and we have forgotten the second
stanza but not our catechism. We know
the list: Ira Aldridge, Marian Anderson, Benjamin
Banneker, Ralph Bunche, George Washington Carver,
W.E.B. DuBois, Duke Ellington, Marcus Garvey
and on. Twenty-five Negro Leaders. We cut their
mythical figures from the glossy pages of Ebony
where they tell us to learn all we can, be twice
as bright. We ignore this reading lesson.
Those Negroes are history. They can bring
nothing from yesterday. We are today. In the only
future we can see, we are sliding downhill into spring.
THE ADULTERERS
In the first place
don't mess with no Pharisee men.
They don't mind taking your time,
but they treat you back-street.
Before they picked up stones,
threatening my life trying to make
a paint, sleeping with another
woman's man wasn't really no thing,
more like a little story to spruce up
the big one, but never a real
climax, know what I mean?
I said vows.
They said vows, too. We never
hurt nobody so I was too through
when this gang of priests and elders
--Pharisees mind yuo--come hauling
me out early in the morning
just for sleeping with a woman's
husband while she was off
in the valley. They grabbed
me round my neck, threw me
out in the road, tore my new
wine-colored robe with teh silver
threads around the hem. I would
have fought them if it wasn't
for the Man they brought me to.
He was squatting in the dust
and they called out to Him. Sounds
to me like they trying to catch Him
in a lie about being a teacher
and all. By now they picking up
stones and asking Him what he knows
about Moses' law that says
I'm supposed to die.
Well now, this Teacher stands up
and the sun's bouncing off Him
like gold pieces and He looks at me.
Let me tell you, I know when a man
wants me and let me tell you
He didn't. And he didn't pity
me either. He wasn't even lording
it over me. He just looked.
And way back deep in His eyes,
see like I could see a kind
of thing that the love I been
having couldn't touch. Looking
at Him was like falling
in the sea and the longer I looked
I could see He don't speak nothing
but pure truth and it got me
thinking about vows and such.
Like: they different from words,
they real, alive. Must be living
truth. If that's so, when a man
and woman vow it, they can get the same
feeling between them as a mother and child,
and as two brothers all at the same time
'cause they choose it and if that's so,
when they say I do, they talking about
a whole life thing that don't
get broken just from sleeping
with someone else. But nobody in their
right mind would want to come
between that kind of feeling anyway.
It would be an empty thing,
like hollering in a cave with no
echo--nothing you send comes back,
you can't get no real connection.
I was looking in the eyes
of this Man and I was making
a whole lot of sense to myself.
Well the Teacher Man looks
at these Pharisees and asks if any
of them ever done anything wrong
like lie or steal or call somebody
out of their name or swear or cheat
or gossip. Of course nobody
can say nothing. Then said this
Teacher, Whoever is without
the tiniest bit of sin can throw
the first stone at this woman,
taking about me. By then I
wasn't even scared. They all
tucked tail andslinked off.
And then He says to me, Go
and I went.
Since then I ain't had nothing
to do with nothing that wasn't truth,
especially no Pharisees.
SUNDAY
there were times she would play the piano
she would throw back her head and her wavy black hear would dangle
she would strike the chords and move on the piano stool and sing
Lord Jesus can I have a talk with you
Lord Jesus won't be long till I'll be through
and tears would be streaming down puffy rust cheeks
if there is no God there ought to be
the way she played and cried
Maxine Clair is the author of Coping With Gravity, a collection of poems. Rattlebone, a collection of short stories set in her native Kansas, won the Chicago Tribune's Heartland Prize for fiction and the American Library Association's Black Caucus Award. Her novel, October Suite, also set in the Midwest, was a finalist for the Hurston-Wright Legacy Award. A recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship, Clair is Professor of English at The George Washington University in Washington, DC, where she teaches creative writing.
PROJECTS:
Finish bookmaking in A239
Work on selections for Coffeehouse in A238
BELLWORK: Mugshot Paragraphs
Correct the mistakes in each paragraph.
STUDY GUIDE: Rattlebone, Due Tues. Nov. 25
READING:
Maxine Clair's Poetry
ROSEDALE, KANSAS
Mirages hovered above undulant highways
and summer stomped his dusty feet,
conjured up sunflowers
that ran wildly through fields of cornsilk.
Giant brown faces with yellow rays
stampeded to pavement edge
and stood cooling their feet in the clay.
Blue racers that slept between slats
of a swinging bridge became Python.
Roused by Amazon and Watusi
they slithered to a rocky cathedral
in the creek bed,
and choirs of cicada droned a fugue
of The Seven-Fold Amen.
When the moon like new silver
rolled on edge across black velvet,
Orion laid down his shield
to play hide-and-seek with lightning bugs.
Children caught his eyes in mason jars,
kept the stars to hold to
and went to seek their fortunes.
| PENMANSHIP Cursive writing separated us from the little kids that year, promised us we would be flourishes of gold ink on a white bond expanse of future. Letters flowed into one another like jacks, bangs, secrets, and banana caramels, spelling out girlfriends. Then Norma's mother died: draped in a navy blue sheet, put into a Black Maria, lowered into a hole. We went away searching for Norma's mistake, one something more fleeting than Orpheus' backward glance that set this thing in motion. We sensed it then. Like a teacher with the final word it would stand stark, guiding our lives as we made ovals, strokes, loops, and slants, each of us outlining one unknowable letter in the endless alphabet. |
DEJA VU
Like a yellow flag, my mind plants
a singpost for itself, a re-vision
of something I've never seen, the re-seeing
of a scene I never wrote. Here it is again,
Soweto. Women walking on a road. Bodies
shaped in angles that hold a three-sided
fury with gnarled hair; slender shadows
whose reappearance could give me the chance
to rewrite my descriptive passages of the corpses
they bear, the blood they wring from their skirts.
As if clairvoyance were a gift, I've been given
the second sight of girls, boys, silhouetted
against a casaba moon, slipping past a gatekeeper
into cliché: thousands dead or missing.
And living is a sending out of moments. That
is the gift. Each must come back in deja vu
like a pod on a bough of the akee-fruit tree,
opening in its time, round with delight or venom.
COAL OIL AND SUGAR, 1954
When the nine o'clock whistle blows
our way, we can smell manure and bacon
from the packing house across the river.
The August night sky leans down for us
to touch. Mamma Hayes braids her hair
on her porch. Down the block somebody
yells, All hid? Next door Georgie, who's
too slow to read and cannot go to school, begs to stay
outside until ten when the street light goes out
and we go to bed thinking of school one sleep away.
Attucks, Wheatley, Douglass--mostly names
of schools we know, Dunbar Annex is ours,
a haven on the second floor of the Agency
where official workers must not be disturbed.
Hear our verses opening the day, reluctantly
at first, God is love. Make a joyful noise...
See us reciting in single file, eight rows
of faces, brown and artless as sunflowers:
.....Between the dark and the daylight,
.....When the night is beginning to lower,
our skinny stalks rooted to this soil
of English, arithmetic, geography.
We lift our voices and sing--not the dirges
yet, not the curses we will learn before
we sing love songs again. Black still verges
on the profane, the color of a bad word for female
dogs; for weapons, loaded snowballs in February,
on our sleds all day, a dose of coal oil and sugar
down our throats to ward off whooping cough. With
pudding and juniper tea our evenings boil over
like a pot on the back burner whose steam
rises and stains the wallpaper in shapes we dream
about. We cannot know that when we turn this page,
a schoolboy face with a bullet hole, the murdered
face of Emmet Till, will find those shapes.
The smooth, tied hands with mud from the bottom
of the river will worry our dreams like blood
on snow. We lift our voices and sing. Negro
History Week and we have forgotten the second
stanza but not our catechism. We know
the list: Ira Aldridge, Marian Anderson, Benjamin
Banneker, Ralph Bunche, George Washington Carver,
W.E.B. DuBois, Duke Ellington, Marcus Garvey
and on. Twenty-five Negro Leaders. We cut their
mythical figures from the glossy pages of Ebony
where they tell us to learn all we can, be twice
as bright. We ignore this reading lesson.
Those Negroes are history. They can bring
nothing from yesterday. We are today. In the only
future we can see, we are sliding downhill into spring.
THE ADULTERERS
In the first place
don't mess with no Pharisee men.
They don't mind taking your time,
but they treat you back-street.
Before they picked up stones,
threatening my life trying to make
a paint, sleeping with another
woman's man wasn't really no thing,
more like a little story to spruce up
the big one, but never a real
climax, know what I mean?
I said vows.
They said vows, too. We never
hurt nobody so I was too through
when this gang of priests and elders
--Pharisees mind yuo--come hauling
me out early in the morning
just for sleeping with a woman's
husband while she was off
in the valley. They grabbed
me round my neck, threw me
out in the road, tore my new
wine-colored robe with teh silver
threads around the hem. I would
have fought them if it wasn't
for the Man they brought me to.
He was squatting in the dust
and they called out to Him. Sounds
to me like they trying to catch Him
in a lie about being a teacher
and all. By now they picking up
stones and asking Him what he knows
about Moses' law that says
I'm supposed to die.
Well now, this Teacher stands up
and the sun's bouncing off Him
like gold pieces and He looks at me.
Let me tell you, I know when a man
wants me and let me tell you
He didn't. And he didn't pity
me either. He wasn't even lording
it over me. He just looked.
And way back deep in His eyes,
see like I could see a kind
of thing that the love I been
having couldn't touch. Looking
at Him was like falling
in the sea and the longer I looked
I could see He don't speak nothing
but pure truth and it got me
thinking about vows and such.
Like: they different from words,
they real, alive. Must be living
truth. If that's so, when a man
and woman vow it, they can get the same
feeling between them as a mother and child,
and as two brothers all at the same time
'cause they choose it and if that's so,
when they say I do, they talking about
a whole life thing that don't
get broken just from sleeping
with someone else. But nobody in their
right mind would want to come
between that kind of feeling anyway.
It would be an empty thing,
like hollering in a cave with no
echo--nothing you send comes back,
you can't get no real connection.
I was looking in the eyes
of this Man and I was making
a whole lot of sense to myself.
Well the Teacher Man looks
at these Pharisees and asks if any
of them ever done anything wrong
like lie or steal or call somebody
out of their name or swear or cheat
or gossip. Of course nobody
can say nothing. Then said this
Teacher, Whoever is without
the tiniest bit of sin can throw
the first stone at this woman,
taking about me. By then I
wasn't even scared. They all
tucked tail andslinked off.
And then He says to me, Go
and I went.
Since then I ain't had nothing
to do with nothing that wasn't truth,
especially no Pharisees.
SUNDAY
there were times she would play the piano
she would throw back her head and her wavy black hear would dangle
she would strike the chords and move on the piano stool and sing
Lord Jesus can I have a talk with you
Lord Jesus won't be long till I'll be through
and tears would be streaming down puffy rust cheeks
if there is no God there ought to be
the way she played and cried
Maxine Clair is the author of Coping With Gravity, a collection of poems. Rattlebone, a collection of short stories set in her native Kansas, won the Chicago Tribune's Heartland Prize for fiction and the American Library Association's Black Caucus Award. Her novel, October Suite, also set in the Midwest, was a finalist for the Hurston-Wright Legacy Award. A recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship, Clair is Professor of English at The George Washington University in Washington, DC, where she teaches creative writing.
PROJECTS:
Finish bookmaking in A239
Work on selections for Coffeehouse in A238
Thursday, November 13, 2014
Books! Publishing on Figment/Teen Ink
AGENDA:
Let's finish up on bookmaking...
For those of you who have made books successfully, take a look at the following websites and think about publishing your short stories and poems and vignettes (once edited and proofread):
Figment:
http://figment.com/
Teen Ink:
http://www.teenink.com/
Tomorrow you are excused periods 7 and 8 for a Master class with Mira Jacobs, author of The Sleepwalker's Guide to Dancing, a first novel.. Please bring a notebook and pen and go to the Ensemble Theater.
HMWK: For Monday, read the first two chapters in Rattlebone
Let's finish up on bookmaking...
For those of you who have made books successfully, take a look at the following websites and think about publishing your short stories and poems and vignettes (once edited and proofread):
Figment:
http://figment.com/
Teen Ink:
http://www.teenink.com/
Tomorrow you are excused periods 7 and 8 for a Master class with Mira Jacobs, author of The Sleepwalker's Guide to Dancing, a first novel.. Please bring a notebook and pen and go to the Ensemble Theater.
HMWK: For Monday, read the first two chapters in Rattlebone
Friday, November 7, 2014
Bookmaking Day/Rattlebone
AGENDA:
Let's make our books!
Today, try to finish up the design and printing of your book. Make your best effort to complete the project, but do not worry if you cannot finish the book. Do good quality work and turn in what you have by the end of the period. You can still make your book next week.
MAKEUP QUIZ for House on Mango Street for those who would like a retest.
NEW BOOK: Rattlebone by Maxine Clair
The Civil Rights Movement in the American South was a struggle for the civil rights in the modern times. It challenged the racism in America and made the country a humane society for all. Some of the popular people who participated in this movement were Rosa Parks, Martin Luther King, Jr., Thurgood Marshall and The Little Rock Nine. The Civil Rights Movement Timeline discloses the important events in this historical movement
Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, (1954),was a landmark decision of the United States Supreme Court that declared state laws establishing separate public schools for black and white students and denying black children equal educational opportunities unconstitutional. The decision overturned the Plessy v. Ferguson decision of 1896 which reinforced segregation. Handed down on May 17, 1954, the Warren Court's unanimous (9–0) decision stated that "separate educational facilities are inherently unequal." As a result, de jure racial segregation was ruled a violation of the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment of the United States Constitution. This ruling paved the way for integration and the civil rights movement
Civil Rights Movement Timeline1954: The American Supreme Court declared the segregation in public schools in Brown v Board of Education of Topeka ruling as unconstitutional.
1955: Rosa Parks, an African-American woman, refused to give her seat to a white person on a bus in Montgomery, Alabama. Rosa Parks was arrested on December 1st as required by the city ordinance. The bus boycott was launched. The bus segregation ordinance was declared unconstitutional. Segregation on interstate buses and trains was banned by Federal Interstate Commerce Commission.
1956: Coalition of Southern congressmen demanded for massive resistance to Supreme Court desegregation rulings. On 21st December, the Montgomery buses desegregated.
1957: Arkansas governor Orval Rubus used the National Guard to prevent nine black students from attending a Little Rock High School. According to the court order, President Eisenhower sent the federal troops to keep up with the court order to avoid the segregation in schools. Garfield High School became the first Seattle high school having more than 50% nonwhite students.
To continue with the timeline just click on this link: Historical Timeline
To learn about key figures of the civil rights movement click here
Let's make our books!
Today, try to finish up the design and printing of your book. Make your best effort to complete the project, but do not worry if you cannot finish the book. Do good quality work and turn in what you have by the end of the period. You can still make your book next week.
MAKEUP QUIZ for House on Mango Street for those who would like a retest.
NEW BOOK: Rattlebone by Maxine Clair
The Civil Rights Movement in the American South was a struggle for the civil rights in the modern times. It challenged the racism in America and made the country a humane society for all. Some of the popular people who participated in this movement were Rosa Parks, Martin Luther King, Jr., Thurgood Marshall and The Little Rock Nine. The Civil Rights Movement Timeline discloses the important events in this historical movement
Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, (1954),was a landmark decision of the United States Supreme Court that declared state laws establishing separate public schools for black and white students and denying black children equal educational opportunities unconstitutional. The decision overturned the Plessy v. Ferguson decision of 1896 which reinforced segregation. Handed down on May 17, 1954, the Warren Court's unanimous (9–0) decision stated that "separate educational facilities are inherently unequal." As a result, de jure racial segregation was ruled a violation of the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment of the United States Constitution. This ruling paved the way for integration and the civil rights movement
Civil Rights Movement Timeline1954: The American Supreme Court declared the segregation in public schools in Brown v Board of Education of Topeka ruling as unconstitutional.
1955: Rosa Parks, an African-American woman, refused to give her seat to a white person on a bus in Montgomery, Alabama. Rosa Parks was arrested on December 1st as required by the city ordinance. The bus boycott was launched. The bus segregation ordinance was declared unconstitutional. Segregation on interstate buses and trains was banned by Federal Interstate Commerce Commission.
1956: Coalition of Southern congressmen demanded for massive resistance to Supreme Court desegregation rulings. On 21st December, the Montgomery buses desegregated.
1957: Arkansas governor Orval Rubus used the National Guard to prevent nine black students from attending a Little Rock High School. According to the court order, President Eisenhower sent the federal troops to keep up with the court order to avoid the segregation in schools. Garfield High School became the first Seattle high school having more than 50% nonwhite students.
To continue with the timeline just click on this link: Historical Timeline
To learn about key figures of the civil rights movement click here
Wednesday, November 5, 2014
House on Mango Street Projects
AGENDA:
WRITING: House on Mango Street Projects
Try to complete your Mango Street projects today.
Look at the previous post for instructions.
Develop your vignettes with more details and description.
Let your vignettes resonate with POETIC PROSE.
Think about including DIALOGUE.
What graphics/images can accompany your vignettes?
Design a cover page with a title and picture/photo.
WRITING: House on Mango Street Projects
Try to complete your Mango Street projects today.
Look at the previous post for instructions.
Develop your vignettes with more details and description.
Let your vignettes resonate with POETIC PROSE.
Think about including DIALOGUE.
What graphics/images can accompany your vignettes?
Design a cover page with a title and picture/photo.
Monday, November 3, 2014
House on Mango Street/ Quiz/Writing
AGENDA:
Quiz on House on Mango Street
WRITING: Work on finishing your books.
1. Design a cover and cover page
2. Include a table of contents--the order of your vignettes (don't worry about page numbers)
3. Put the vignettes in order. Add pictures as appropriate.
4. Last page should be your "About the Author" blurb (and a picture of you)
Quiz on House on Mango Street
WRITING: Work on finishing your books.
1. Design a cover and cover page
2. Include a table of contents--the order of your vignettes (don't worry about page numbers)
3. Put the vignettes in order. Add pictures as appropriate.
4. Last page should be your "About the Author" blurb (and a picture of you)
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