4/6

Happy Monday, Juniors!

I have posted a brief survey regarding the Great Gatsby on Google Classroom that I'd like you to complete by tomorrow.  It is not graded so don't panic if you do yours late, but I really need to see student responses from all of you this week before we go "live" with our distance learning next week.  It's a good opportunity to work out any hitches we might have with the technology.  Speaking of, I have not done a lot of work with Google Forms yet, so someone please be nice and email me if I messed up the technology and I will do a "take two" attempt.

Google Classroom is going to become the main way of conveying information to you, so please make sure that you have notifications "on" so that you know when a new assignment or material is posted.  For a while, I will continue to post on my blog, but we may end up transitioning away from that entirely in an attempt to streamline the number of places you have to check for your work.

Looking forward to getting back to our learning!

McE

4/1 Updates and Gastby Post

You should have received a long email to your student email account explaining the next steps for our learning.

Your main assignment for now is to do a post for Gatsby Chapter 4 in the discussion tab on Turnitin.  I will send you an email and post here when there are new discussion topics available for you to comment on.

We will be working on Gatsby for the next few days as we wait for more information from the AP people about what our AP Lang exam will look like.

Congratulations, Juniors!

You are DONE with the research paper!

I'm proud of all of you for completing this task under the most unusual of circumstances.  This says a lot about you and your commitment to learning.

At the bottom of this post, I'm going to include my thoughts on what I hope you've learned from the process.  You don't have to read it, but it's there if you are curious about why we did what we did.

For right now, your main task is to finish reading the Great Gatsby.  I'm sure the district will be providing us more guidance in the upcoming days now that our out of school time has been extended.  But give yourself a little break after finishing your paper, and then finish up with your Gatsby reading.

The AP people are exploring a testing from home option, so as of now, we are assuming you will be doing your AP tests.  Stay tuned.

Research Paper Goals:

I hope you've learned the importance of breaking down a large job into smaller less horrible pieces.

I hope you've learned how to polish take home writing and the process of how to tear apart a sentence a rebuild a stronger one.

I hope you've learned how literature analysis looks at smaller claims (observations) and their larger significance (importance.)

I hope you've learned that academic articles exist in all disciplines, that they may be challenging to read, but that they present important ideas.

I hope you've learned that MLA formatting is just one of many style schools that you will have to follow at the college level.

I hope you've learned how to collaborate with your instructor and peers to help create the strongest possible end product.

I hope you've learned how to synthesize information from various texts into a cohesive and well reasoned argument. 

I hope you've learned how to stick with an assignment that probably drove you crazy at times and to find the motivation and persistence to get it done anyway.

Finally, I hope you feel proud that the essay you turned in is better than an essay you would have written at the beginning of the year and that you've grown as a writer and thinker!

Editing Resources

Here are some of the resources that we used in class today.

Quotation Station

Link to MLA page on quoting dialog

Measuring Station

Content Editing (See scoring rubric from previous posts)

Style Editing  (See scoring rubric from previous posts)

Research Paper Conclusions

Conclusion Slideshow!

So many research paper resources!

MLA Formatting Slideshow (updated for 2020)

Work Cited Formatting. Remember individual entries are outdated. This is just for formatting the page purposes.

Research Paper Style Rubric

Research Paper Content Rubric

Academic Honesty Information

Research Paper Introduction

Introduction Slideshow