WEEK 10

Good Morning and welcome to final-exam week!

Here's your work:


1. Set aside a quiet 45 minutes and work through Practice Test C. This is a test, so try to maintain a testing environment: silence, no breaks, no help from anyone or anything else. I suggest printing the test out, writing your answers on the test, and then moving your answers to the google doc (label it clearly, please).


2. Your final essay...

Education and the Workplace

Many colleges and universities have cut their humanities departments, and high schools have started to shift their attention much more definitively toward STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, Mathematics) and away from ELA (English, Language Arts). Representatives from both school boards and government organizations suggest that the move toward STEM is necessary in helping students to participate in a meaningful way in the American workplace. Given the urgency of this debate for the future of education and society as a whole, it is worth examining the potential consequences of this shift in how students are educated in the United States.

Read and carefully consider these perspectives. Each suggests a particular way of thinking about the shift in American education.

1. ELA programs should be emphasized over STEM programs. Education is not merely a means to employment: ELA education helps students to live more meaningful lives. In addition, an exclusively STEM-based program cannot help but limit students’ creativity and lead them to overemphasize the importance of money and other tangible gains.

2. ELA programs should be eradicated entirely, except to establish the basic literacy necessary to engage in the hard sciences, mathematics, and business. Reading and writing are activities that are best saved for the leisure of students who enjoy them.

3. ELA and STEM programs should always be in equal balance with one another. Both are necessary to providing a student with a well-rounded education. Moreover, equal emphasis will allow the fullest possible exposure to many subjects before students choose their majors and careers.

Essay Task

Write a unified, coherent essay in which you evaluate multiple perspectives on the issue of how schools should balance STEM and ELA subjects. In your essay, be sure to:

• analyze and evaluate the perspectives given
• state and develop your own perspective on the issue
• explain the relationship between your perspective and those given

Your perspective may be in full agreement with any of the others, in partial agreement, or wholly different. Whatever the case, support your ideas with logical reasoning and detailed, persuasive examples.

• Limit yourself to 40 minutes of actual writing and prep.
• Remember the grading criteria we've been practicing (context and framing, counter-argument[s], good support and evidence).

The test and final essay will both be double weighted toward your final grade. Give me a week or so to finalize grades. 


Have a great last week!

WEEK 9

WELCOME BACK!

YOUR WORK: 

DUE Friday at 5pm.


1. ACT Practice Test E .... Corrections and Review.

2. Go to this act site. You'll see five reading passages with questions. Take passages 1,2,3, and 5. (We did passage 4 already). Read through the explanations (No, you don't have to listen to my voice for these) and submit your scores to me in the table in the misc section of the google doc.

3. Go HERE for this week's ACT essay prompt.

4. Revise the School Scheduling ACT prompt (if you're so inclined; it's optional).

CATCH-UP WEEK!

 If you've used a time extension and need to get caught up, then get caught up. If not, enjoy a break from English class.

WEEK 8

 YOUR WORK:

1. ACT Q set (Passage IV, beginning with "Comic books...")  Corrections.

2. Reading skills practice....

a. Skill Builder 1

b. Skill Builder 2

Check here for the corrections for 2a 2b 


3. GO HERE. Read each of the five passages and answer those questions. Set your timer for 42 minutes (that's the same pace as the ACT test, but you'll be answering 48 questions instead of 40 in 35 minutes). You'll be reading these passages:

1. "Men of Brewster Place"
2. "Personality Disorders"
3. "A Poem of One's Own"
4. "How to Build a Baby's Brain"
5. A pair of passages: "In Orbit" and "On July 20th 1969" 

4. In week 5, you watched this video on context and framing. Make sure you're including these strategies in this week's essay.

5. This week we'll leave the SAT and start with the ACT style prompts.  Go HERE for the prompt.  

DUE FRIDAY @ 5:00.

WEEK 7

Good morning!

YOUR WORK:

Everything is due Friday.

1. LBGB...

A. Read chapter 4. 

B. Explain in your own words the five "AVOIDS" in the Style & Usage section.

C. Write a sentence using each term in the pair correctly:

    possible / plausible

    shall / will

    who / whom

D. Write three sentences, each using the word literally in a corret way.     

2. The videos have you getting out your green textbook. Ignore that. I posted a pdf of all the exercises here. Show me your work and post your scores. Also, check your scores from last week's exercises. A few of you didn't tell me how you did, so you may need to score those again. Show me the ones you got wrong.  

Watch this video on modifier problems ...

and this video on case forms. The video cuts in a little after the beginning, but that's ok. You'll hear what you need to hear. I'm more concerned with you knowing how the objective case works (that's where problems tend to show up) than the subjective case.


3. ACT Q set (Passage III, beginning with "The formal tradition..."). Corrections.  *Make sure you do this Q set after the two videos from #1. 


4. Revise the Paul Bogard SAT prompt. Most of you need to read the prompt again. It lays out how to organize it pretty clearly: evidence, reasoning, and appeal to emotion (or other style/persuasive technique like word choice). Remember, your job in that essay to show HOW he builds his argument, so use the terms that describe persuasive writing.


5. Go HERE for SAT prompt #2. Remember to use the language of the prompt itself to guide your writing (the basic language about evidence, reasoning, and other elements, doesn't change from one prompt to another, so get in the habit of organizing your essay that way.) NO REVISIONS THIS TIME! So proof it carefully.


Have a great week!

WEEK 6

WELCOME!

1. Chapter 22 in the GREEN textbook deals with common usage problems. Some of these issues involve the use of words that sound similar but are different words--affect and effect, for example. (You'll recognize that pair from the LBGB work last week. These exercises are similar but cover a lot more usage problems; yes, we'll be skipping LBGB this week.) Others are simply conventions that developed over time to become accepted usage in standard English (no logical rule to point to--you just need to know how to use the word). We'll work through a handful of these exercises. As you'll see, the exercises apply to particular alphabetical sections of the glossary. Be sure to refer to these before (or while) you do the work. 

The corrections and review cover all of the exercises.  

a.  ex 1, p.699
b.  ex 3, p.702
c.  Rev A, p.702
d.  ex 4, p.705
e.  ex 5, p.709


2. SAT persuasive essay analysis:
Before we write ACT style essays, we're going to take a couple of weeks and look at the SAT essay. This one acts as a good bridge between the persuasive essays you've been writing and the analytical essays you will be writing for the ACT. The SAT essay is different in that it has you analyze a persuasive piece of writing. The ACT will have you analyze and synthesize three different positions on a debatable issue.

Go to HERE for this week's writing assignment.




EVERYTHING'S DUE FRIDAY NIGHT.

Have a great week!

WEEK 5

Good morning! I hope you had a restful catch-up week. 


YOUR WORK:

1. Complete practice test D (Read the stuff below before you start!). No ACT q set this time--we'll do the whole test instead. I would suggest printing the test out rather than doing it from the computer. It's better practice for the real thing.

Some things to be mindful of:

a. There's no time limit for this test, but because the ACT limits you to 45 minutes for this section, you want to be aware of how you're doing in terms of pace. I suggest setting a time and noting where you're at in the test at the 45 minute mark. Don't stop there, just note it. As you do the practice ACT q sets for the remaining weeks, work toward getting them finished in 8 or 9 minutes max. You may be there already. If so, great. The idea is that when you sit down to take the official test, the clock will not be something to make you anxious. You should be familiar enough with your pace to not even have to think about timing.

b. Find a quiet place where you won't be disturbed. Your official testing environment will be extremely quiet (as in no head phones!). You need to get used to that.

c. Keep careful score when you watch the review video. I'll explain then how to calculate a raw ACT score (the 1-36 number that ACT uses to report your score).

d. Don't use anything other than your brain to help answer the questions.

e. Take the test in ONE SITTING, and keep all electronic devices--phones, ipods, watches, whatever--in another room. These are the conditions you'll find at your official test site. Your practice needs to be as close to the real thing as possible. A wall clock is fine.

Corrections, review, and scoring video. 

2. LBGB...

• Read the "Style and Usage" section of chapter 3. 
• Look at these usage pairs and write a correct sentence using each (You may use my examples as models, but write your own):

            a. affect / effect
            b. assure / ensure / insure
            c. compose / comprise
            d. farther / further
            e. i.e. / e.g.
            f. me / myself

3. Watch this video on context and framing and revise your Facial Recognition essay by adding context and framing. Yes, you already have a final score on that essay. I'll treat it like a separate exercise and include it in the week 5 work score. (Some of you may have already done this per my comments last week. If you did it well, then you're done.) 

4. ACT Essay #3...
Choose either the Helmet Law or Facial Recognition prompts and write the essay from the OPPOSITE POSITION from what you wrote earlier. That's right--you may be writing from a position you don't actually believe in. That's ok. We're practicing the persuasive mode of discourse; fake it persuasively.

Here's a reminder of grading criteria:

• context and framing (watch the video above!)
• clear position statement in first P
• full arguments in each P
• counter-argument mentioned and knocked down (this can be one or more of your 3 body P's)
• overall, solid persuasive writing

As usual everything is DUE FRIDAY @ 5:00pm.