As the year comes to an end, I’d like you to look back over your 8th grade year and reflect. What were the most important lessons youl learned this year? Think about those things discovered both in and out of the classroom. Consider the changes you’ve seen in yourself and your friends. What will you take with you into high school and beyond?
Storytelling #2
When you choose a novel to read, how do you go about making your decisions? What about a book gets you in enough to make you pick it up off the shelf?
Once you decide you like a book, how do you tell if it’s great or just ok? What are your criteria for a great novel??
Story Telling
We tell stories for dozens of reasons and to millions of people, but some stories seem to stick to our souls a little more than others.
Over the past year or so, what is the favorite story you’ve read? What about that story makes it so important to you?
What’s the Big Deal with Shakespeare?
Next week, we’re going to start working through William Shakespeare’s play A Midsummer Night’s Dream. Now, we all know Shakespeare is famous, but do you know why?
Take a few minutes and do a little research on Ol’ Bill. Tell me why we’re still reading his plays 400 years after he died.
Poetry – Does it still matter?
For the past week, we’ve been studying different forms of poetry in class and discussing the role that poetry plays in literature and history. We’ve read poems about love, fears, independence, identity, war, and so many other things, and have discussed the poems’ meanings and tones and moods. You all know that I obviously think poetry matters, but I want to know: Now that the world has become a place of instant communication and insanely-accessibly information, do we need poetry? Does it matter anymore? As a society, have we moved past the need to have poetry as a form of communication? As a way of carrying on our traditions?
Dreams
In class this week we’ve read an excerpt from Barack Obama’s Dreams from my Father as well as Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.’s speech “I Have a Dream” and we’ve talked about the American Dream and all of our personal dreams and hopes for the future of the world, but we haven’t talked much about how they’re all connected. Take a moment and think of your dreams for your own future and the future of the world – how are they connected? How are they connected to the dreams of Barack Obama, Sr. and Martin Luther King, Jr. and our founding fathers? Go further and find the connections to other historical figures – even Adolf Hitler had a dream. Find the root of those dreams – where do they all meet?
A Final “Flowers” Thought
Some say we learn more from our mistakes than our successes. In the case of Charlie from “Flowers for Algernon,” do you think we learned more from the failure of the experiment than we might have learned from it’s success? Explain your answer with specific details and consider what we learned about Charlie, the brain, and humanity as a whole.
Flowers for Algernon 2
Charlie has to learn a lot about the world around him and some of those lessons seem brutal to us. Over the couse of the story, what do you think is the hardest lesson Charlie has to learn? Explain your thoughts.
Flowers for Algernon 1
The story “Flowers for Algernon” by Daniel Keyes is about a guy who chooses to have brain surgery to increase his IQ. Charly has gone through life struggling with everthing and says he just wants to be smart.
At first, it seems this surgery is a great idea, but there are a lot of possible side effects and the doctors aren’t even sure the operation will be permanent if it does work.
Do you think Charly should have this operation? Explain why or why not using what you know about Charly’s life and the information the doctors have given us about the outcomes of the operation.