Extra Credit for Thanksgiving Week

Extra Credit Opportunities

You may complete one of the following for extra credit in Quarter 2. I will make another option available at the end of the quarter. Th assignment below is due by Friday, Dec. 4, 2009.

The Road: Movie vs. Novel
The movie version of The Road will be released on November 25. As an extra credit opportunity, you should attend the film with a parent/guardian. Then complete the following steps in order to earn up to 5 extra credit points. Trust me; these seemingly small assignments do make a difference in your overall grade for the quarter.

1. Go to the theater and watch the movie, The Road. You will need to attend this with a parent/guardian since the movie is rated R.
2. Save your ticket stub to submit with your paper.
3. Create a detailed double bubble comparing/contrasting the movie to the novel. Each bubble requires a specific example from the film and the novel.
4. Type a 3/4 to one-page, thoughtful observation about the most striking similarities and differences between the film and movie. This must provide evidence that you considered both texts carefully. Do discuss at the end of your paper, which version of the story you preferred and why. Offer specific examples.
5. Discuss the film's themes and comparisons to the book with your adult viewing partner. After this discussion ask the parent/guardian, with whom you viewed the film, to hand write or type his/her reflections about the film and sign the paper.
6. Submit the movie stub, double bubble, your paper, and your adult's reflections (these can be brief) by Friday, December 4.


If you are unable to attend the film but would still like to do an extra credit assignment, complete the following:

Invocation of the Muse

Your Task: Imitate the first sixteen lines of The Odyssey, imagining that this is the opening to an epic about your life.

Procedure:

1. Think about a Hero Quest you’ve taken in your own life. Make this the basis of your piece.
2. Begin with an invocation to the Muse: “Tell me, Muse…” or “Sing to me, Muse…” or similar.
3. Include epithets about yourself and the other characters of your epic.
4. Give a snapshot of your quest.
5. Include a bit of “formal-sounding” language. The idea is to play with Homer’s language in order to become more comfortable with it.
6. Describe the setting. Make the setting sound grand in scale.

Example:

Tell me, Muse, about the man of many miles,
Who many times dashed as he ran through the streets of Santa
Monica. He saw the Fatigue of his teammates and knew their pain.
On the course, he too suffered great pains within his lungs,
Yearning for the finish line, and his teammates’ success.
He could not guide his team to victory, though he wanted to:
His teammates had lost the race because of their laziness.
The slackers had disregarded the wise words
Of the well-traveled coach Cady, who knew the path to victory.
Tell the tale for us, beginning with the previous day,
Sometime after the piercing bell had sounded.
When all the others, seeking refuge from the torments of school
Had fled, light-footed to the safety of their homes.
Yet he alone, longing for the final mile and his own return,
Wan confined by sound-minded Coach Cady, who strives for excellence,
To the fenced-in, crimson rubber surface that was his training ground.

The Road Essay

The Road Essay blue prewriting packet is due Monday, November 9.
The typed rough draft is due Wednesday, November 11.
The final essay's last day for full credit is Monday, November 16.

Writing Prompt:

In a well-organized and thoughtful essay answer one of the following questions. Work to say something that is uniquely your own about this text and to move beyond plot summary to thematic analysis.

1. What is McCarthy’s thematic message about good versus evil? Create a complex thematic statement and use well-selected evidence to support your statement. To get at your theme statement you may compare and contrast good and evil in a double bubble or examine causes and effects of both good and evil in two multi-flow maps.

2. Is this novel optimistic or pessimistic about humanity? In other words, does McCarthy believe that humans are basically good or evil? Take a stand on one side or the other and use convincing evidence from the text to prove your position.

3. According to McCarthy, what causes people to remain good in the face of evil and what are the effects on their humanity? Create a complex thematic statement and use insightful quotes to defend your ideas.

Grading Rubric

Organization:

___ The introduction engages the reader, introduces the topic, and includes a thesis statement that will serve as a blueprint for the main ideas developed in the body paragraphs.
___ Body paragraphs follow solid paragraph structure by beginning with a topic sentence, including two or three PIEs, and ending with a concluding sentence which refers clearly to thesis statement. PIE = Point, Illustration, Explanation
___ Transitions from part to part and paragraph to paragraph are smooth and logical.
___ Conclusion summarizes the ideas presented in the paper and leads the reader to an interesting idea—the So what? or the So why does this matter to life?

Ideas:

___ Thesis is clearly stated, fully expanded, specifically states the main ideas of your paper
___ Thesis says something specific about the topic being explored. Theme = topic + author’s lesson about topic
___ Ideas are presented logically and clearly in body paragraphs that are relevant to the thesis
___ Each paragraph includes at least two illustrations quoted from the text to support ideas.
___ All ideas are explained and analyzed fully.
___ Papers that exceed expectations also analyze how the elements of McCarthy’s style contribute to the theme—in other words, how McCarthy uses language to convey a message.

Conventions:

___ Words are clear, precise and spelled correctly
___ Sentence formation is clear and varied
___ Proper punctuation is used, especially with conjunctions.
___ MLA format is used to document direct quotations, and a works cited entry for The Road is included at the end of the essay. Other sources used are properly cited.

Due Dates

Typed rough drafts, with proper MLA formatting, are due in class on Wednesday, November 11.
Final draft window: 8:30 a.m. Thursday, November 12 to Monday, November 16 at 3:10 p.m. Papers submitted on the 17th will lose 25%. Papers submitted on the 18th or after will lose 50%.

Was it a meteor strike?

Today in class we read an excerpt of a National Geographic article on how a meteor strike could cause the Apocalypse. If you want to read the entire article, click here. The date of the catastrophic meteor strike has been updated to 2068. Check out Dr. Tholen's latest findings.

One of the scientists featured in the article was Dr. David Tholen, who is the uncle of English 10 teacher Ms. Rachel Tholen Hatten. So Ms. Hatten contacted her uncle for more details about what the world would be like so that we could prove or disprove that Cormac McCarthy thought a meteor strike would cause the end of the world as we know it.

Here's the email response from Dr. Tholen:


From: David Tholen
To: Rachel Tholen Hatten
Sent: Mon, October 19, 2009 1:16:11 AM
Subject: Re: Meteor strike


Ms. Hatten: Question for you. Next week, I'll start teaching Cormac McCarthy's novel, The Road, to my sophomores. I don't know if you've read it,

Dr. Tholen: Nope, haven't read it.

Ms. Hatten: It's the story of a father and son struggling to stay alive in a post-apocalyptic world. McCarthy never explicitly says what the cataclysmic event was that destroyed the earth and civilization, but I think it was probably a meteor strike. When you have a second, could you email me a description of what the world would be like if Earth suffered a major meteor strike, both short and long-term effects?

Dr. Tholen: Well, a lot depends on the size of the strike. We had a strike last October over the northern Sudan, but all we got out of it was a bright flash and a nice collection of Ureilite meteorites. A strike the size of the one that killed off the dinosaurs raised enough dust into the
stratosphere to block out sunlight for years. If you've ever seen the sky after a major volcanic eruption, you might begin to imagine what it's like, only many times worse. Also, it's believed that a major firestorm would be triggered by the impact, generating a lot of soot that would remain in the lower part of the atmosphere for a shorter amount of time. With sunlight blocked off, photosynthesis stops, and plants die out. Without plants for food, livestock starts to die out.
Without livestock for food, people start to die out. It becomes a fight over dwindling food supplies. Very much the sort of thing imagined for the so-called "nuclear winter." Unlike nuclear winter, where radioactivity can persist for a long time, depending on the isotopes producing the radiation, asteroid winter lasts only a few years. As the atmosphere begins to clear, the Earth starts to warm up again. But wait! The impact released a huge amount of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere, from the carbonate locked in a lot of bedrock. Now we've got the greenhouse effect going, and the Earth could be too hot for decades until plant life regains a foothold and starts to consume the carbon dioxide in the atmosphere.

Ms. Hatten: I'd like to be able to share your response with the students, so they could have some real knowledge of what we'd be facing if something like that happened.

Dr. Tholen: Some books have been written about it. Might make for a non-fiction reading assignment for your students. A few years ago, Gaddy Bergmann sent me a copy of his book, The Migration of the Kamishi, which is intended to become a trilogy. In this fiction, Apophis did hit and nearly wiped out humanity. But some did survive, basically sending mankind back to the stone age. Interesting book. The author's power of description of living things is what caught my eye. The plot isn't quite as strong, and I did encounter some technical errors (the waning crescent Moon is a before dawn sight, not an after dusk sight).

Passage Analysis Paragraph

Point: Identify rhetorical elements and introduce the effect on the reader
Illustration: Quotes
Explanation/Analysis: Pull out ideas about how the style of the quote is connected to the theme of the entire novel

McCarthy’s asserts that the post-apocalyptic world is both literally and figuratively hell on earth, in which evil threatens to overtake any remaining goodness in the world. He begins literally by vividly describing the entire country as being “looted, ransacked and ravaged. Rifled of every crumb” (McCarthy 129). McCarthy’s precise diction creates the picture of utter destitution, of a barren landscape that has been robbed by circumstance and humanity of its life-sustaining properties. Additionally, McCarthy’s metaphoric comparison of night to “casket black” suggests that the entire world is a tomb. The boy and the man are the occupants, struggling to push open the door of the casket in order to see light, to maintain hope. Finally, in crafting this picture of hell on earth, McCarthy draws the comparison, through simile, that the world is “like a dawn before the battle” (129). The word “battle” implies that the boy and dad must fight everyday to scavenge for scarce resources and to fight off would-be attackers. Yet, more importantly, this day’s battle, like the sun rising at “dawn,” is part of a larger symbolic war in which survival represents a triumph of humanity and perseverance in a world that has become a living hell.

Ely, The Prophet

Check out an email that I just received from Ms. Hatten:

So, looks like the prophet Elijah is the harbinger of the apocalypse—the “great and terrible day of the Lord.” Oh, McCarthy. You’re so cool.

“According to the Books of Kings, Elijah raised the dead, brought fire down from the sky, and ascended into heaven in a chariot. In the Book of Malachi, Elijah's return is prophesied "before the coming of the great and terrible day of the Lord,"[2] making him a harbinger of the Messiah and the eschaton in various faiths that revere the Hebrew Bible.” http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elijah

Roehl note: Eschaton means judgement day or end of the world. I had never heard that word before.

Rhetorical Elements and Literary Strategies

Strong writers master the art of rhetoric. Literary devices are a subset of rhetoric. Strong writers are able to incorporate elements of rhetoric in their own writing, and reading and analyzing literature for elements of rhetoric is an important step on your path to strong writing.

Click here to review a brief list of rhetorical elements.

Close Reading of a Text

Goals:
Close reading can and should promote insights and questions about texts beyond the specific passage under consideration. Close reading should develop your ability to:

1) Identify specific rhetorical elements and literary strategies within a short passage.
2) Consider the effect these techniques have on a reader’s perception of tone and content.
3) Explain ideas about how the style of the entire text is connected to the content and theme of the entire text. These deep explanations are what is missing in your E's of your PIEs.

The Passage:
“He found pieces of flint or chert in a ditch but in the end it was easier to rake the pliers down the side of a rock at the bottom of which he’d made a small pile of tinder soaked in gas. Two more days. Then three. They were starving right enough. The country was looted, ransacked, ravaged. Rifled of every crumb. The nights were blinding cold and casket black and the long reach of the morning had a terrible silence to it. Like a dawn before battle. The boy’s candlecolored skin was all but translucent. With his great staring eyes he’d the look of an alien” (129).

1. Underline any word, phrase, or line that jumps out at you, even if you’re not sure why. Think about sound, diction, anything that even suggests style, whether you can put a name to what’s going on or not.
2. With a partner, see how many of your underlined words or phrases you can label. If you don’t know the actual name of the technique, or if you aren’t certain, describe the effect as best you can. Write your ideas in the margin.
3. Make a thematic connection to the underlined words or phrases. How does this stylistic element add to the text as a whole? Reflect not just on the element, but on the whole text—how are they related?

Try it again with one of the following passages:

“They scrabbled through the charred ruins of houses they would not have entered before. A corpse floating in the black water of a basement among the trash and rusting ductwork. He stood in a living room partly burned and open to the sky. The waterbuckled boards sloping away into the yard. Soggy volumes in a bookcase. He took one down and opened it and then put it back. Everything damp. Rotting. In a drawer he found a candle. No way to light it. He put it in his pocket. He walked out in the gray light and stood and he saw for a brief moment the absolute truth of the world. The cold relentless circling of the intestate earth. Darkness implacable. The blind dogs of the sun in their running. The crushing black vacuum of the universe. And somewhere two hunted animals trembling like groundfoxes in their cover. Borrowed time and borrowed world and borrowed eyes with which to sorrow it” (130).


“When he woke again he thought the rain had stopped. But that wasnt what woke him. He’d been visited in a dream by creatures of a kind he’d never seen before. They did not speak. He thought that they’d been crouching by the side of his cot as he slept and then had skulked away on his awakening. He turned and looked at the boy. Maybe he understood for the first time that to the boy he was himself an alien. A being from a planet that no longer existed. The tales of which were suspect. He could not construct for the child’s pleasure the world he’d lost without constructing the loss as well and he thought perhaps the child had known this better than he. He tried to remember the dream but he could not. All that was left was the feeling of it. He thought perhaps they’d come to warn him. Of what? That he could not enkindle in the heart of the child what was ashes in his own. Even now some part of him wished they’d never found this refuge. Some part of him always wished it to be over” (154).

For the second passage that you selected, write a paragraph in which you sum up how the style of the passage is instrumental in conveying the idea of the text as a whole.

A Song On the End of the World

Friday in class students read the Milosz poem below, annotated the poem looking for lines that show imagery, tone, mood and irony. Students also gave each stanza a title to try to get at the main message of the poem. After discussing the poem, students individually answered the following closing questions on the back of their poem.

What is Milosz message to us about the end of the world?
What would McCarthy say to Milosz about the end of the world?
Which one has it right? Why do you say this?

To watch a visual retelling of the poem that concentrates on images, click here.

To see a video of the poem being read over some haunting images, click here.

A Song On the End of the World
by Czeslaw Milosz
Warsaw, 1944

Translated by Anthony Milosz

On the day the world ends
A bee circles a clover,
A fisherman mends a glimmering net.
Happy porpoises jump in the sea,
By the rainspout young sparrows are playing
And the snake is gold-skinned as it should always be.

On the day the world ends
Women walk through the fields under their umbrellas,
A drunkard grows sleepy at the edge of a lawn,
Vegetable peddlers shout in the street
And a yellow-sailed boat comes nearer the island,
The voice of a violin lasts in the air
And leads into a starry night.

And those who expected lightning and thunder
Are disappointed.
And those who expected signs and archangels' trumps
Do not believe it is happening now.
As long as the sun and the moon are above,
As long as the bumblebee visits a rose,
As long as rosy infants are born
No one believes it is happening now.

Only a white-haired old man, who would be a prophet
Yet is not a prophet, for he's much too busy,
Repeats while he binds his tomatoes:
No other end of the world will there be,
No other end of the world will there be.

The Road Reading Schedule

The date indicates the due date for the reading selection. Be prepared for discussion or a quiz.

Oct 20: pgs 3-27
Oct 21: pgs 28-mid 52
Oct 22: pgs bot 52-mid 77
Oct 23: pgs bot 77-102
Oct 26: pgs 103-top 129
Oct 27: pgs mid 129-top 161
Oct 28: pgs 161-mid 180
Oct 29: pgs bot 180-204
Oct 30: pgs 205-top 231
Nov 2: pgs mid 231-256
Nov 3: pgs 257-287