Shakespeare Renaissance Project

During the next couple weeks we will be reading a Shakespeare play together. This post is to outline the tasks which are expected of you to receive credit for this project.

1. We will be reading the play together. Your participation is expected.

2. You should complete a post that is a response to the historical information I have posted about the Renaissance. This can be as simple as you discussing what stuck out to you the most and why.

3. You will complete four separate posts about the play (Act I, Act II, Act III, and Acts IV and V). These posts should be 3-4 paragraphs in length, include a very brief summary of what we read, as well as your reactions. You should incorporate direct textual evidence into these posts.

Your grade will be calculated with the following formula:
Participation = 50%
Web Posts = 10% each (x5)

Exemplar Research Papers

The following links are to exemplar research papers. None of these are perfect, but they all can show you something I am looking for. Some of these writers did an excellent job citing their sources, while others did well at including their own voice with their research. You will find small errors in these papers, but overall they can help you get an idea of what yours should look like when you are through.

Solar Energy

The Reef Tank

Belly Dance

Coaching Young People

Forensic Entomology

Game Design

Tattooing

LOOOKY HERE!!

Though I am not in the classroom today, your responsibilities have not changed. You should know most of this, but allow me to reiterate:

First Period: To be on pace, you should have both your Puritanism and Rationalism posts up on your blog. Your rough draft is due today. If you do not have a rough draft ready at the beginning of Monday's class, I will consider it late. Put drafts in my drop box BEFORE you leave today. You should be through with or working on Module 3.

Second Period: To be on pace, you should have your Short Story #1 posts up on your blog. Short Story #2 is due at the end of next week, so you should work on that. Your rough draft is due today. If you do not have a rough draft ready at the beginning of Monday's class, I will consider it late. Put drafts in my drop box BEFORE you leave today. You should be through with or working on Module 3.

Third Period: You should continue with your research. The next time you see me, I will be checking your research notes. I will be looking for paraphrased notes, direct quotes, and the bibliographic citations for ten separate sources. Showing me an article you copied or e-mailed to yourself is not good enough. You also have your Middle Ages Literature project to work on; it is due at the end of next week.

If you post something to your blog, make sure you leave me a comment, and then check yours to see if there is anything else you need to work on.

Questions?

E-mail Me:

dana.siegmund@gmail.com

My Autobiographical Writing -- Take me out to the BALL GAME

Even before I was born, it seemed to be determined that baseball would be a part of my life. As the story goes, my father was not ready to go to the hospital while my mother was in labor with me until the Boston Red Sox game was over. They were getting beat pretty badly (9-2) by the Baltimore Orioles, but perhaps there was something else interesting to see in that game, or maybe my mother was not quite ready to go to the hospital either – I didn’t get my first breath air until 3:56 that morning. To make a long story short, my father is a huge baseball fan, as was his father and grandfather before him. I am sure that when I was born, he was already thinking of how he could pass the love of this sport to his first child.

I remember watching baseball with my dad when I was very young. He would try to explain to me what was going on, but I am sure I did not understand much as I watched players run, throw, and hit. Later he would teach me how to sing “Take me out to the Ball Game,” which might have added a little more context to what I saw. The first big moment would not come however until 1980 when I was five years old when my family lived in Oxnard, California. My life as a baseball fan changed forever on that summer day when I stepped foot for the first time into a Major League stadium -- Dodger Stadium in Los Angeles California.

I can still remember going through the turnstiles on our way inside. Santa Claus had brought me a baseball cap the previous winter, but not a Dodgers’ cap. My first piece of respectable headgear was representative of the California Angels, and I can remember the man who ripped the tickets telling me, “Kid, you are in the wrong place. You need to go up the road a little.” I didn’t get the joke, and I remember not liking the man since he was trying to tell me that I did not belong at the stadium on that sunny California day that would be the one when I went to my first baseball game.

I cannot say I remember many of the details of that particular game aside from the food I ate: hotdogs, chocolate malt, peanuts, pretzels, and probably more. The scorecard for this game exists somewhere, and on it my dad kept track of the items I ate as well as the number of beers he drank. Before leaving the park, I remember stopping to get a Dodgers t-shirt for me with my name ironed onto the back of it. It was one of my prized possessions until I moved to Georgia and became a Braves fan.

I went to my first Braves game probably sometime in 1982. I remember they were playing the Cubs, and the game was at the old Atlanta – Fulton County Stadium that was the home of the Braves before Atlanta’s Centennial Olympic Stadium was constructed and later transformed into Turner Field. Once again, I do not remember the particulars of this game, but by this point, I knew that I was familiar with the rules and was able to follow the game since I was playing t-ball at the time. I was six or seven years old, and already at my second baseball stadium. Little did I know the list would continue to grow.

In the two or three years that followed, I would visit Fenway Park in Boston, the second-oldest existing Major League Baseball park twice, once to see the Red Sox play the A’s, and another time to see them play the Tigers. By the time I was ten, I had also visited Yankee stadium to see the Yankees play the Blue Jays. As I got older, I would see the San Francisco Giants’ former home, Candlestick Park, where I got to see the Braves as the visiting team; and the Philadelphia Phillies’ old park, Veterans Stadium. I added yet another stadium to my list when the Braves moved into their new home. I would see the Chicago Cubs play in Wrigley Field, where I was lucky enough to catch a ball, and just a couple of summers ago. I missed seeing Mark McGuire’s longest homerun of his career when I was standing in the concession line at the old Busch Stadium in Saint Louis, and I saw the Washington Nationals play in RFK Stadium where I saw Roger Clemens pitch a game where he struck out fourteen Nationals.

I still have more places I would like to add to my list of baseball stadiums, AT&T park in San Francisco, the new stadium in Pittsburg, and PETCO Park in San Diego to name a couple. I don’t think I would really crave going to new ballparks if my family would have never moved from California to Georgia and I did not get to see the first two so early. My list of stadiums is just a collection I keep, and I am not really sure what it says about me other than I like to travel and I like watching baseball games.

User Agreement

Using a weblog for our classwork will require some parameters for your safety and the quality of everyone's work. First, you should recognize that your work, as well as mine will be published for the entire on-line world to see. This will ultimately make us all responsible for better and more original output than ever before. By visiting other students' weblogs, you will be able to view all their work, and it will also make it easy for me to see who is not making an effort to submit work that is original.

Once you create your own weblog for this class, I will add it to the class blog roll so everyone's work can be accessed from this page. I encourage you to look at your peers' work for ideas or inspiration, but what you submit must be your own. Language Arts lends itself well to this format since you will be asked to respond to the literature and history we study with your own ideas and opinions. There are no right or wrong answers in a Language Arts class, so looking at other students' ideas can help you. It can also create problems if you choose to be lazy.

I will leave comments about your work. These comments will usually instruct you on how you can improve your work. Please make sure you check your comments and your e-mail regularly, and make sure you are finished with one assignment before moving to the next.

Since this weblog will be part of your education at Classic City High School, any activity on your weblog should be considered school activity, even if it is done outside of school. You should feel free to create posts that are not school related, but you should also be sure to refrain from anything that could be considered inappropriate. This includes, but is not limited to: references to alcohol or drugs, violence, or gang activity, foul language, nudity, threats, etc.

Plagiarism is submitting someone else's work as your own. This can be done in many ways: copying work from Wikipedia, classmates, Sparknotes, etc. If you plagiarize your work, you will receive a zero -- no questions asked.

THE USER AGREEMENT:

1. I agree to submit original work to my weblog. I realize I will have the opportunity to view my peers' work, and I will use this opportunity constructively. I understand that if I choose to plagiarize, I will receive a zero for the work in question with no option to redo the assignment in question.

2. I agree to keep my weblog appropriate for Classic City High School. I understand that if innapropriate material were to appear on my weblog, be it from myself or an outside comment, I will be asked to remove it. Failure to do so will result in my weblog being removed from the class roll. I also understand that refereneces to illegal or dangerous activities will be reported since it is the legal responsibility of my teacher.

To agree, post a comment to this message like this:
I agree to Mr. Siegmund's Weblog User Agreement.
I will not add your weblog to the class roll until I receive a comment from you like the example above.

The Puritans

The Puritans:

To study the Puritans' literature, we must first understand who they were as people. The Purtitans' core beliefs were as follows:

Total Depravity - through Adam and Eve's fall, every person is born sinful - concept of Original Sin.

Unconditional Election - God "saves" those he wishes - only a few are selected for salvation.

Limited Atonement - Jesus died for the chosen only, not for everyone. Irresistible Grace - God's grace is freely given, it cannot be earned or denied. Grace is defined as the saving and transfiguring power of God.

Perseverance of the "saints" - those elected by God have full power to interpret the will of God, and to live uprightly. If anyone rejects grace after feeling its power in his life, he will be going against the will of God - something impossible in Puritanism.

You should read more here. You should also read more about the Puritans in an American Literature textbook.

For some more real fun, check out some of these Puritan names.

YOUR TASKS:
Read some of this excert of William Bradford's Of Plymouth Plantation . You do not necessarily need to start at the beginning; just find a section that appeals to you. When you are through, you should post the following to your blog:

1. Briefly summarize the Puritans' beliefs. This should be a paragraph or two.

2. Write a 4-5 paragraph response to the Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God and Of Plymouth Plantation. Explain your thoughts about how these people lived. Better responses will have some direct textual evidence to support what you say. You may want to review these texts before writing your response.

3. Choose two of the four beliefs at the beginning of this post of which you saw examples in Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God, or Of Plymouth Plantation. Provide these examples with direct textual evidence.

Continue with The Rationalists:

Do you want to make an "A" on this and your next literature projects? Grades of 93 and up will be reserved for those who complete a better project. Details here.

SELF-EVALUATE YOUR WORK!!

ELAALRL1 The student demonstrates comprehension by identifying evidence (i.e., examples of diction, imagery, point of view, figurative language, symbolism, plot events and main ideas) in a variety of texts representative of different genres (i.e., poetry, prose [short story, novel, essay, editorial, biography], and drama) and using this evidence as the basis for interpretation.

ELAALRL2 The student identifies, analyzes, and applies knowledge of theme in a work of American literature and provides evidence from the work to support understanding.

ELAALRL3 The student deepens understanding of literary works by relating them to their contemporary context or historical background, as well as to works from other time periods.

ELAALRL5 The student understands and acquires new vocabulary and uses it correctly in reading and writing.

ELAALRC2 The student participates in discussions related to curricular learning in all subject areas.

The Summer is for Baseball.

Prospect by Bill Littlefield

Prospect is a novel about a retired baseball scout named Pete Easty who has given up on his own life once he is not needed anymore by the team he worked for since they started using computerized scouting systems instead of 'baseball men' like Easty. At the beginning of the novel, Pete is living in a nursing home, waiting to die. He makes friends with one of the employees named Louise who has a great nephew who is a promising baseball player.

Louise wants Pete to watch her nephew play, but he insists that he is retired. When a fire burns down part of thew nursing home, Louise invites Pete to live with her until the building can be repaired, which is a trick to get Pete to look at her nephew.

Littlefield shows how someone's life can be restored when they begin to have confidence in themselves. Louise does this for Pete by proving to him that he can still matter in the baseball world.

The AUtobiography of Malcolm X p 319 -- 421

The final section of The Autobiograohy of Malcolm X centers around his trip to Mecca, Africa, and other places across the Holy Land to learn more about true Islam. When Malcom arrives in the Middle East to make the Haj, the spiritual pilgramage to Mecca that Islam asks all able-bodied Muslims to attempt at least once in their lifetime, he feels like an outsider since he does not know many of the traditions and he does not speak Arabic.

Since only true Muslims are permitted inside the walls of Mecca, Malcolm, being an American was not immediately allowed inside the city. He had to stay in a dormitory at the airpoit awaiting a trial of sorts to prove he was a true Muslim. While staying in the dormitory with many other people, Malcolms suspicion of people with pale skin begins to drop when he his treated very hospitably by Middle Easterners with very pale skin. Malcolm explains that these people would have passed for white people in the United States, but here, people were all treated as brothers in Islam, no matter what they look like. This is where Malcom's attitudes begin to turn. He is still angry about the situation in the United States that has kept his people constantly oppressed, but readers can immediately see him begin to re-evaluate some of the beliefs Elijah Muhammad taught Malcolm.

When Malcolm returns to the United States, he continues building his new ministry and making speaking arrangements about what he had learned in the Middle East. He speaks of uniting the balck people across the globe to pressure the United States through the United Nations to give black people the human rights they have been denied since Europeans stepped foot in North America. Malcolm also makes many references to the fact that Elijah Muhhamad, though he never speaks ill of him, has people in his following dedicated to killing Malcolm in the name of the Black Muslim movement. Though the event is not printed in the book, Malcolm X is aware that he is unlikely to live to see the publication of this autobiography.

I firmly believe The Autobiography of Malcolm X should be required reading in American schools. It is extremely arrogant for anyone to deny that black people have been systematically degraded and denied access to the resourses of our country to this day. In schools, we are taught mostly about people like Martin Luther King Jr. because people (white) feel he is safe and peaceful, but it is impossible to understand the entire story without looking at the other side of the coin at a man who was angry and not afraid to show it, and not afraid to speak his mind to white people. I am not saying I understand the entire story of the struggle for equality that black people still fight, but now I feel I am a bit closer.

The Autobiography of Malcolm X p 179 - 318

Once Malcolm gets out of prison, he begins to meet personally with Elijah Muhammad, and eventually becomes one of his ministers. As a minister for the Nation of Islam, Malcolm X makes speaking arrangements across the country and later opens his own mosque in Harlem. The paraphrased speechs are some of the most interesting passages in the book. Malcolm X speaks very harshly about the white power structure that has kept black people an underprivelidged minority for 400 years. He points out that black people have been in North America longer than English colonists and other European immigrants, yet they have stayed at the bottom.

.

Malcolm X is probably more critical of black people who seek integration with the white people more than the white people themselves. He sees these people as a much bigger problem, and he constantly chides them for being so complacent and gullible to think that the white power structure will ever give them anything.

.

One part that will always stick out to me is his criticism of the 1963 march on Washington that Malcolm calls the Farce on Washington. As he explains, black people had been talking of marching on Washington for years and years before it happened, but this march was not going to be very civil. As originally planned, but not well-organized, black people were talking of marching on Washington to make specific demands of the government and show how angry they were with the way they have been treated. As Malcolm X explains, the US government began making huge contributions to the rally that also came with some of their suggestions, which eventually watered down the march to a picnic. Malcolm X is very critical of the middle-class blacks that were at the rally to make a scene -- showing off for the white people, he says. He goes further to criticize Martin Luther King Jr. among others for allowing this to happen.

.

Malcolm serves as a minister for the Nation of Islam for twelve years before he begins to hear rumors about Elijah Muhammad's sexual misconduct. Any other Muslim would have been excommunicated for doing what Elijah Muhammad had done, yet Malcolm X tries to find ways to rationalize and excuse Elijah Muhammad's actions. Malcolm X's stature in the Nation of Islam was already making Elijah Muhammad jealous, and when it reaches the point that his sexual misconduct is reaching the mass of Black Muslims, he uses some comments Malcolm X made about the assassination of John Kennedy to suspend him from the Nation of Islam.

.

Malcolm X heres of the first orders for his death while hanging out in Miami with Cassius Clay.

The Autobiography of Malcolm X pages 1 - 178

Up until now I have known very little about Malcolm X. If you would have asked me what I knew, I would have said he was a civil rights leader who did not believe in peaceful protest. I would have said he was the polar opposite of Martin Luther King Jr. in that he did not believe in turning the other cheek. I probably would have gone as far to say he hated white people and called them all devils.

.

I am learning fast that some of my preconceived notions about Malcolm X are inaccurate. Many of the things I may have known come from the philosophy of Elijah Muhammad, Malcolm X's mentor for many years. Even though I am less than halfway through this autobiography, Malcolm has made reference many times to his split from Elijah Muhammad and how he now disagrees with his philosophies since they are not supported by true Islam.

.

The beginning of this book is very exciting. It chronicles Malcolm Little's early life up until he is around 21 years old. Readers meet Malcolm's parents and his brothers and sisters. Malcolms father is a preecher who also holds meetings for the Marcus Garvey society, which troubles the white people in his town. One night a group of white men kill Malcolms father, and then lay his body across the train tracks to be run over. The insurace company cheats his mother out of the money she and her family have coming to them. Malcolm's mother eventually has a mental breakdown and is taken to a mental hospital. Malcolm and his siblings are split up into different homes.

.

Malcolm's life changes several years later when he moves to Boston to live with his sister. It is here that Malcolm begins a life of pimping, hustling, drinking, and smoking 'reefers'. Malcolms talent for hustling eventually takes him to Harlem where he is eventually charged with burglary and sentenced to ten years in jail. I left many of the details out here. This part of the book was very easy to read since it caters to people's interest in crime and street living. Malcolm was smart to grab his readers attention in this way.

.

I am now reading about Malcolm's first years in jail. He is beginning to learn more about Islam, and is coresponding with Elijah Muhammad on nearly a daily basis. I have been really interested in learning about Muhammad's philosophies, especially how he explains how the races developed.

.

I am glad I am finally learning more about this important figure in American history. I am also glad I have not watched Spike Lee's film yet. It will be interesting to see how well it represents what I am reading now.

We Were the Mulvaneys by Joyce Carol Oats

I have not been keeping track of my reading records as of late, so there will be another book coming very soon. I finished this book last week while I was at the beach. I suppose I should have taken a picture of the book when I was there.

We Were the Mulvaneys is a novel that follows a family over the course of about twenty years. At the beginning of the book in 1976, the Mulvaneys have everything going for them: they own a beautiful farm, a successful roofing business, and their four children are all successful in their own ways.

The theme here is how a family may choose to deal with tragedy. In this case, the family tragedy happens to the daughter, Marianne on prom night 1976. Initially most memebers of the family deal with their pain in unproductive ways; in fact, by the midpoint of the novel, the family is in shambles -- almost all the things they have going for them are gone.

Joyce Carol Oates shows how a family can be torn apart, and then put back together, something that takes nearly two decades in the Mulvaneys' case. I liked this novel because it is the kind I like -- the kind that follows a family or another group of people for many years or generations. I also enjoyed Oates' writing style. She is very descriptive and can be witty at times. I am likely to read another of her novels.

This novel was from Oprah's book club. I do not know from where or whom I got this book. It was on my bookshelf for at least four or five years before I picked it up. I am glad I did.

p.s. : There is a copy of We Were the Mulvaneys in the Classic City High School media center.