Ms. Neville's Class Resources

AP Lit: Vocabulary quiz on Monday; resume/references/career narrative due on Wednesday.              -also-

It may be helpful for you to consider the introduction to Shakespeare and Modern Culture in the context of the brief descriptions of various kinds of literary theory we discussed on Friday. Which ones does the author seem to be using?

English IV:

1.) Vocabulary quiz on Monday; Career Narrative due on Wednesday.

2.) Please see Moodle if you need the Canterbury Tales homework due on Monday; note that 4th period’s assignment is different than 8th & 9th period’s assignment (you’ll all do the same work this week, just in a slightly different order).

3.) You should be filling out your very brief chivalry journal entries each day! Your journal and 1-2 page reflection are both due on Thursday.

4.) As always, your AoW is due on Friday. This week’s article was tweeted on Friday, but I do have hard copies available for you if you want to pick one up.

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I realize this may look a bit wacky, but here are the vocab words from Friday and today in case you missed any of them. The quiz will be on Monday, September 24th.

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All four of these books relate in some way to September 11, 2001 — however, the events of that day are not the sole focus of any of them. The first three are distinctly about life After That Day, the fourth takes place decades before 2001 while the twin towers were still new to the Manhattan skyline and a man was boldly attempting to walk across a tightrope in between them.

Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close by Jonathan Safran Foer is narrated by a young boy whose father died when the World Trade Center towers collapsed. His unique voice is both childlike and profound as he treks around New York City in a broad search for anyone who may have information about a key and a name he found in his father’s closet.  Supporting characters such as an elderly neighbor, the protagonist’s grandmother and her “imaginary friend”, all add richness to this story. It’s painful to read at times because the little boy is blatantly searching for help from adults, but the kind of help he seeks is seemingly nowhere to be found. It’s a uniquely written book, though, that is well worth a read if you don’t mind a writer who takes some drastic liberties with punctuation to help develop a narrator’s voice. 

Love is the Higher Law is a brief young adult novel by David Levithan that weaves a story among three NYC teens whose lives were drastically changed when their first week of school was interrupted by planes flying into nearby buildings. While most of the story centers around other aspects of their lives, the shared experience of being on the cusp between childhood and adulthood when they witnessed firsthand the buildings burning and falling is one of their strongest bonds. This quick read isn’t the strongest writing I’ve seen from this author, but it is nonetheless a book I enjoyed reading and confidently recommend to my students.
Gwen Cooper’s memoir entitled Homer’s Odyssey changes gears a little. This is a nonfiction story about her experience of raising and loving a cat who was born without eyes. She was living in Manhattan on 9/11/01; one of the most traumatizing things for her was being unable to get back to her apartment for several days while Homer was alone, hungry, and terrified by all of the strange sounds and smells that had taken over the neighborhood. This part of the story takes up a mere chapter of the book, but it manages to capture a poignant and detailed account of how a person’s (and a pet’s) life was affected and how it has gone on.

Of these four books, Colum McCann’s Let the Great World Spin is undoubtedly the most beautifully written. It fascinated me while reading to know that this book was written years after the towers collapsed, but so eloquently uses the towers as an architectural pivot point for several stories that seem completely separate until about three quarters of the way through the novel when even the most obscure details turn out to bind the individual narratives together.  I can’t do it justice while leaving enough time to finish grading your essays and quizzes tonight, so please go here if you want to read an adequate review.

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“I was trying to feel some kind of good-bye. I mean I’ve left schools and places I didn’t even know I was leaving them. I hate that. I don’t care if it’s a sad good-bye or a bad good-bye, but when I leave a place I like to know I’m leaving it. If you don’t you feel even worse.”     – J.D. Salinger, The Catcher in the Rye

To my Indy kids, present and recent:

     I hope you’ll forgive me for not addressing this during the last month and a half of school as more and more of you surmised that something was up. Please know that it was because I care first and foremost about your education, and didn’t want to detract from it. Quite frankly I didn’t know at the time exactly what the conclusion to the situation would be, so I also wanted to wait until I did. Not to mention, if I may break from my stable adult tone here, that all the tissues in the world could not have handled my own potential reaction to telling some of you face-to-face.

     The time has come to provide a brief but factual explanation, so here it is: after having my teaching duties at IHS dramatically reduced due to financial reasons and declining enrollment, I made the difficult but necessary decision to seek employment elsewhere. I hoped all summer that perhaps something would work out so I could stay at IHS, but unfortunately that is not the case. Last week I accepted a full-time position at Cuyahoga Heights.

     I hope that being only a few miles away means I will still run into many of you often. Your development into literate, intelligent human beings has been a huge focus of my life over the past five years, and a joyful result of that has been that I have gotten to know many of you quite well. You have challenged me, fascinated me, taught me, and made me proud of you. In sharing your talents, you’ve introduced me to books, music, art, and technology that I would have been unaware of otherwise. You’ve made me think, laugh, reconsider, and yes, even cry a few times. 

     Please don’t take it personally that room 212 will be (to my knowledge, at least) empty this year. I’m still available to suggest books, write college recommendations, and hear about your random encounters with old vocabulary words and literary characters. I have yet to decide whether I’ll keep using this blog or start a new one, but I will leave it up nonetheless and I can always be reached via email at ms.neville@gmail.com or Twitter @ms_neville . Feel free to pop in sometime to let me know where you are and what adventures you’re having!

     Good luck and best wishes to you all. Most importantly, though, THANK YOU for etching five years’ worth of good memories into the hard drive of my brain.

Love,

Ms. Neville-Jellen

P.S. For the many of you who read the previously quoted novel in my class, I think I should end with Holden’s quote from about a page later:

“Sleep tight, ya morons!” 

Apologies to those of you who don’t get the joke… reading the book will remedy that!

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Yes, there are haiku about the product categories on the backs of the coupons (the one above, obviously, is representative of toilet paper). Kudos for at least attempting to engage my brain while trying to get me to spend money!

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NO! My favorite living author has died!

I think I will be in official mourning all summer. Bring on the black veil.

If it weren’t for Ray Bradbury, I’m not sure I would have become an English teacher. Reading Fahrenheit 451 during my own sophomore year of high school opened my mind up to amazing new worlds and ways of understanding literature. I have been sharing that with my own students ever since I student taught in 2003/04.

Of all of my weird “English geek” quirks, the oddest may be that I have sent Mr. Bradbury a Halloween card every year for quite a while. While this sounds vain in the face of his passing, I suppose I have to let the dream of getting a response from him die now.

It must have been amazing for him to live long enough to see so many of the things he dreamed up for his stories become reality — ATMs, wireless communication, reality television…

It’s also amazing for me to consider how someone I never actually met had such a profound influence on my life.

*sob*

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Anyone taking AP next year who has not already seen Mr. B for their summer work, please do so TODAY.

You will have a short quiz over Dead Poets Society at the beginning of class tomorrow.

Assignment due 6/1/12: You each have a copy of the lyrics to “The Sound of Silence” by Paul Simon. Please annotate it thoroughly before class tomorrow – it is rich with figurative and connotative language, so I expect to see an abundance of thought recorded on the page. Listening to the song will enhance your overall experience:

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BvsX03LOMhI]

On a (possibly) interesting side note, I often suspect songs like this are part of what made me choose to become an English teacher. My parents were huge music fans; records by the Beatles, Simon & Garfunkel, Peter, Paul, & Mary, Bob Dylan, and various other folk and rock artists were always playing in the background during my early childhood. I picked up on my parents’ passion for the music, and in my very young way tried to understand this attachment. I knew there must be more to it than just interesting sounds, so my penchant for seeking symbols and connections in words began. By my late adolescence it had added so much dimension to my life I decided there couldn’t be any more rewarding job than helping others make sense out of the world in the same way. So here I am.

What can I say? It’s the end of the year and I’m feeling reflective and sentimental. Lots of changes are on the horizon.

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