Creative Writing: A writing exercise and near-silent critiquing. Tomorrow, we’ll start the workshop process.
Journalism: Interviewing and writing. Tomorrow we’ll have an open-book AP Style quiz. First draft of the new story is due Monday, BOC.
Language Skills: More practice with sentences, taking a paragraph made up of simples and making it more readable by combining them into compound, complex, and compound-complex. Quiz tomorrow!
‘Twas a day full of roses.
Creative Writing: Writing exercise among the flowers. Greene gave us a handout on writing dialog and unveiled his sustained-silent-reading unit. Second drafts of the first short story were due.
Journalism: We created source-and-question lists for our new stories, and Greene unveiled his sustained-silent-reading unit.
Language Skills: Greene unveiled his sustained-silent-reading unit. We took a their/there/they’re quiz and talked about why people make grammar and usage mistakes. Greene handed out a list of commonly misspelled words.
Creative Writing: Writing exercises and a belated Publish or Perish. Second draft of the first short story is due at the end of class Tuesday, and Greene’s cat apparently hid Sara’s notebook under the couch.
Journalism: Quizzes returned to a mix of joy and horror. The publishable draft of the lunch stories came before the red pen, and all but one were sent packing. Meanwhile, Greene set us to work on another story.
Language Skills: Quizzes came back, at long last, along with an answer key. We perused a handout on sentence types, formed the Ovoid of Learning, and then were set to work writing our own sentences (five, to make a paragraph: at least one of each type).
Creative Writing: We workshopped Greene’s “Blueberry” story, and got back the first draft of Story One. Our mission: Revise the thing up to second draft by end-of-class Tuesday.
Journalism: Libel/Privacy Quiz and then we resumed “Shattered Glass.” Homework: Read the Wall of Shame and use it, and the movie, to write a 242-word essay on why it is (or is not) wrong to to be a less-than-credible journalist. Due Monday, BOC.
Language Skills: Quiz on the identification of nouns, pronouns, and verbs.
Why does Greene wear black every Thursday (Outlaw Thursday)?
Creative Writing: Writing exercise, and a return to critiquing “On Blueberry Hill.” We’ll workshop it tomorrow. Also tomorrow, Publish or Perish, notebook collection, and the return of the first short story.
Journalism: The Red-Pen Fairy scampered all over our articles, causing much self-doubt. There’s a quiz tomorrow, which also is a bit scary. But we watched the first half of “Shattered Glass,” and, suddenly, our life doesn’t seem so bad.
Language Skills: Big, fat review of Nouns, Verbs, and Pronouns. Quiz tomorrow on same.
The First Four Steps of a Critique
Creative Writing: We handed in our short stories and Greene began to walk us through a critique of a short story called “On Blueberry Hill.”
Journalism: Red pens in hand, we read each others stories and found them wanting. We got our own stories back and set to fixing them up. 2d is due tomorrow BOC.
Language Skills: Greene made us read a literary analysis and then set us to finding and typing the nouns, pronouns, and verbs.
Creative Writing: Exercise. Word. Reminder that notebooks will be collected Friday and that 1D of the second story is due tomorrow, BOC.
Journalism: Interviewing, writing and revising for the lunch story, which was due EOC.
Language Skills: Pronouns. Greene gave us a handout and set us to a pronoun word wall.
Creative Writing: Writing exercise, and then we talked about the decline of the American vocabulary. Greene suggested we explore his websites (SoylentGreene and RWWGreene.com), and also recommended we check out Figment. Then,. we did some writing. The next short story is due Wednesday, BOC.
Journalism: Review and explanation of libel and privacy. Quiz Friday on libel, privacy, AP Style, and journalism roles. Story 1D is due tomorrow, EOC.
Language Skills: Parts of Speech word walls. In the old days, kiddies, you would have learned this stuff by drilling and writing each example 10 times. Don’t you love progress?
Creative Writing: We put a set of short stories (1D) into the drying rack, and started another set. These stories are due (1D) on Wednesday, Feb. 8, BOC. We also entered the world of Publish or Perish, an every-Friday occurrence.
Journalism: The newest crop of South journalists continued to gather information about the new lunch-bell plan, and learned a bit about libel.
Language Skills: Today was quiz day: parts of speech and diagramming simple sentences. There was no homework; nothing to worry about over the weekend.
Creative Writing: Writing time. There’s a short story due tomorrow, BOC, which means it needs to be typed up, printed out, and lightly polished. Also, Greene got us stared on the Publish or Perish wagon, collecting our emails and inviting us to the blog.
Journalism: Interviewing and hall passes. Many of us have appointments with the principal tomorrow. The deadline for the first draft, 400 words, is Monday, BOC.
Language Skills: Open-note quiz tomorrow on Parts of Speech and the diagramming of simple sentences.
