Week of 11/8-11/12

Every one of us came to class ready to learn and excited for the short week!

On Monday, we finished watching Of Mice and Men after Ms. Nickow had to turn it off right before Lennie killed Curley's wife. After finishing up the movie, we revisited our Of Mice and Men Anticipation/Reaction Guide to compare our answers about what we anticipated was going to happen and how we feel about situations after they've happened.

Next came Tuesday. We met in the computer lab to start on our expository papers. We had the option of picking from prompts provided by Ms. Nickow, or we could choose our own prompt as long as it was approved by Ms. Nickow. Before starting our papers, we quickly discussed how to write a good thesis statement. We then got busy working on our papers and getting our thesis statements approved by Ms. Nickow.

Wednesday was another day to have class time to work on our papers. We spent the entire class period working, in hopes to get as much of our Shareable Draft done as possible.

Fortunately, we got to have a four-day weekend! We had Thursday off because of Veteran's Day and we had Friday off because it was a teacher institute day.

Overall, we had a very productive week! We got a lot done with such little time.

Week of November 1-5

This week marked the beginning of second quarter; we’re already done with one-fourth of the school year! On Monday, Ms. Nickow handed back our independent reading assignments from first quarter. She had found some common errors in the papers, so we quickly went over usage of that vs. who, filler words, how to punctuate a title, and font selection. We then revisited Aristotle and pathos, ethos, and logos, trying to incorporate these methods of persuasion into our arguments for the upcoming debate.

Tuesday was a late start day, and the day started off with the introduction of a new seating chart, followed by the announcement that all independent reading journals must be written on the form that can be found on Ms. Nickow’s website. Ms. Nickow then went on to ask us to fill out an informal evaluation for her so that she can improve her teaching methods. We were then given the rest of the day to finish up preparing for the debate.

With Wednesday came the debate, and many interesting arguments were brought up. All groups were well prepared, and there was no clear winner for most of the debates. At the end of the day, Ms. Nickow asked us to evaluate our own individual performance in the debate, considering factors such as whether or not you were able to bring up all the points that you wanted to bring up.

We started watching the movie version of Of Mice and Men on Thursday and continued watching the movie through Friday, making the end of the week peaceful in comparison to the heated debates we had on Wednesday; Ms. Nickow decided to stop the movie right before Lennie killed Curley’s wife.

Week Of October 25th-29th

After having quite a few hectic weeks we actually had a regular schedule all five days! On Monday we learned about rhetoric. After taking a few notes, we were put in groups of three and every group had a different passage from John Steinbeck's Of Mice and Men. Then we proceeded to think about why Steinbeck put these passages in his novel, hence learining about rhetoric. On Tuesday we turned in our independent reading assignment essay for the quarter. Most of us got a big surprise with the ending Of Mice and Men. Venturing further on into our week we started to learn about debates and persuasion only to find out we were going to hold a debate of our own. After the topics were distributed to their assigned student groups, we wasted no time getting to work finding points to bring up in our debates. For quite a significant part of the week we rigorously worked on our debate points. We thought about which of Aristotles three elements of persuason would best appeal to our audience and be the most powerful elements to use, logos pathos or ethos.

All in all we started the week with rhetoric, handed in our essays and ended the week and the quarter preparing for our debates.