Tuesday (The Final Tuesday School Day of 2010)

Ah, the students are counting down the days until break. They should be counting their missing assignments though because they only have until the end of this week to get them in! I have no problem grading things over the break to help their grades out, but there's very little I can do for students who have lots and lots of gaps in my gradebook.

Today we looked at a poem by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, the American poet with (in my opinion) the best middle name. The poem is called "The Tide Rises, The Tide Falls," and it's a piece the characters in Walk Two Moons read in their language arts class. Since it has to do with some of the thematic issues in that novel, I thought we'd look at it in class. Turns out that it's really depressing. Here it is:

The tide rises, the tide falls,
The twilight darkens, the curlew calls;
Along the sea-sands damp and brown
The traveler hastens toward the town,
And the tide rises, the tide falls.

Darkness settles on roofs and walls,
But the sea, the sea in darkness calls;
The little waves, with their soft, white hands
Efface the footprints in the sands,
And the tide rises, the tide falls.

The morning breaks; the steeds in their stalls
Stamp and neigh, as the hostler calls;
The day returns, but nevermore
Returns the traveler to the shore.
And the tide rises, the tide falls.

Yep. Depressing business. Longfellow wrote that one after his wife passed away, and it's really an extended metaphor (to use one of our old poetry terms) about how life is temporal (to use a word part--tempor) or how we are transient (to use another--trans) beings.

We finished looking at the dodgeball articles, one with a formal and serious tone and the other with a sarcastic more personable one. The students completed (some of them; the ones who worked well) a worksheet on the D.R.A.P.E.S. that the authors used and how they used logical, emotional, and ethical appeals.

Then, they had time to work on their writing which is still due Thursday.

One last thing--because of my generosity and love for my students, I gave them each a paper that has all the word parts with their meanings. I didn't do it so that they would have a cheat sheet for Thursday's test. I gave it to them so that none of them will have an excuse for why they couldn't study for Thursday's test. They all have the word parts, and they should spend lots of time the next two nights becoming experts so that they can do well on the test.