Pun Intended: Class Log & Discussions

Adios, Will!

UB Spanish: We are getting conversational up in here!  Today we reviewed "ser," and then learned how to use and conjugate "estar."  Tomorrow John will cover for me while I attend a memorial service, and you will be expected to work with an assigned partner to create a dialogue that you will read aloud before the class on Monday.

UB Literature: Finish Twelfth Night for homework, and be prepared to create your own, modern scenes in class tomorrow.  John will cover for me.  You will perform your scenes for me Monday; remember, I like costumes!  Read "Why I Live at the P.O." by Eudora Welty over the weekend.

Hey hey it's Tuesday (yeah I'm pressed for a header)

UB Spanish: Now that we have officially conquered Spanish time, adjectives, tener, and AR verbs, we can tackle the verb "SER"!!  Ah mi!

UB Literature: We're unraveling our plot... how will it end?  Stay tuned to find out!

Case of the "Mondays"

UB Spanish I: Review day!  Since a majority of the test grades were unmentionable, today was dedicated to reviewing and worksheets.  I know, boring.  Let's see if we can't STUDY, and thus have the opportunity to do new and exciting activities.  Remember, there is no review game like fly-swatter vocabulary if you don't know the vocabulary!!

UB Literature: Today we reviewed Act 2.2 to talk about the "tangled knot" of events, as well as the FATE of each character.  How do you think their fates are knotted together?  Tomorrow we will continue reading. 

Almost summer! (for me)

NLR Japan Excursion: Only one more day!  :(    Today we finished our face masks, rehearsed our plays, and sponge painted our kimono robe costumes., (then scrubbed the acrylics off the floor!)  Bring your parents tomorrow! 

UB Spanish: "Baile Bingo" review game and our first quizzish-test.  The results, save maybe two, were not pretty.  STUDY.

UB Literature: We continued to read Tweflth Night, only not as fun because I left all our costumes in my car :(  But we did have an amusing song-ish performance by our Feste, anyways, as well as a great example of what a caterwaul is.  Um, thanks, guys...  and answer your reading response for Monday!

Scrubs + Kabuki = awesome!

NLR Japan Excursion: Today we planned out our kabuki/noh performances for Friday's Parent Day, and began making our face masks.

UB Spanish: Reviewed how to conjugate "tener," looked at how to conjugate regular "AR" verbs.  Quiz tomorrow!

UB Literature: Today we assigned parts sans gender discrimination and continued to read through Shakespeare's Twelfth Night.

Homework: First, choose one character we have met in the play.  Then, describe how the character is presented to us, (example: Feste is obviously a clown/fool/jester).  You may want to do some brief research to look into each character's full job/station description, (example: Malvolio is a steward, what the heck is a steward??), as well as looking into what is expected of a person in that position and how you would expect them to act. 

Then, I want you to tell me what we know about this person after meeting them and their unique personalities.  What are they like in regards to their titles or jobs?  Is their presentation (what they are described as), congruent with the reality of who they are?  The obvious example for this is Viola: we meet her as a girl who then DISGUISES herself as a boy.  I want you to think about the words "disguise" and "deception."  What kinds of disguises and deceptions are being paraded in the play due to inconsistencies between our expectations of a character's personality and what their personalities are really like?  Why might Shakesepeare use this as a theme?   

Potato Paints

NLR Japan Excursion: Haiku writing!  A look at "Real Samurai Write Poems" Basho, two word poems, and reading poems for both metaphor and imagery.  We made "authentic" haiku scrolls with our own haiku poems and potato "wood block" stamps.

UB Spanish: A full day!  We reviewed pronouns, looked at how to tell time in Spanish, learned to count to 100 (cein), and looked at our first Spanish verb conjugation: "tener" (to have).  Don't forget that "tener" is a stem changing verb, and soon we are going to look at "ar," "er," and "ir" verbs, known as regular verbs.  Quiz Thursday!!

UB Literature: We did an exercise in ordering and understanding Shakespeare's lines, then read through the second scene of Twelfth Night.

The Complete Works of Shakespeare Abridged tonight at 7:30!

Rain, rain...

NLR Japan Excursion: Today was origami and Japanese floral arrangement day!  We made water balloons, hopping frogs, and paper cranes; didn't quite make it to origami lillies, tulips and roses, but maybe tomorrow.

UB Spanish: Reviewed a list of vocabulary that was both old and new, reviewed adjectives and learned some new ones, began working with the construction of "Me gusta a..."  Played one round o f "Celebrity Who Am I?" and the award goes to Michael V. for correctly identifying Flavor-flav before I even got to mention the giant pocket watch!  Assigned a practice worksheet for homework.

UB Literature: Reminder of what grades I have for you: blog creation (all), "Cathedral" writing prompt (those who were absent from discussion), and "Sonny's Blues" writing prompt (all).  Introduced Shakesepeare's Twelfth Night, or What You Will, and began reading Act I.1 

Last Thursday

NLR Japan Excursion: Sushi making (veggie & crab rolls), tea cup painting, and Spirited Away!

UB Spanish: Definite and indefinite articles review, pronoun review, adjective review, and "fly swatter vocabulary" game

UB Literature: Listened to some Louie Armstrong and John Coltrane, broke into groups to find & discuss different motifs and images in "Sonny's Blues."

Homework: Read the introduction found inside your copies of Twelfth Night for Monday

All UB students: trip to Reynolds Auditorium to see the Arkansas Shakespeare Theater's production of A Midsummer Night's Dream.  I loved it, and I hope you all did, too!

Friday ~ was a work day, no  class!

3rd day - going strong!

NLR Japan Excursion: Thank you so much Tim for the incredible demonstration and lesson on how to sketch, ink, and color anime cartoons!!

UB Spanish: Reviewed the basic parts of speech, personal pronouns (yo/tu/el/ella/nosotros/usted/ellos/ellas), and began to look at adjectives and how they must agree with the nouns they modify in both GENDER and QUANTITY.  Review the extra vocabulary sheets I handed out in order to start building a strong speaking base. 

UB Literature: We read T.S. Eliot's poem The Waste Land in conjunction with J.D. Salinger's short story, "A Perfect Day for Bananafish." 

Homework: Finish reading James Baldwin's short story "Sonny's Blues" for class tomorrow.  Then, in your blogs, answer the following questions based on your own thoughts and responses to the story:

• Amiri Baraka, (Leroi Jones), a contemporary black writer, wrote the following words about bebop, or new jazz, music:
  • "Bebob rebelled against the absorption into garbage, monopoly music; it also signified a rebellion by the people who played the music, because it was not just the music that rebelled, as if the music had fallen out of the sky!  But even more, dig it, it signified a rebellion rising out of the masses themselves, since that is the source of social movement -- the people themselves."   (from Selected Plays and Prose)
• Think about how music contributes to both the plot and the characterization in the story.  How does Sonny react to the new jazz/bebop of the 1950S, compared to his brothers initial reaction?  Why do you think this is?
• We have been discussing the theme of alienation in the stories we have read; what type of alienation do each of the characters experience, both individually and collectively? 
• Think about the meaning of the term "grace."  Why is this the chosen name for the daughter who dies?  Why does the narrator contact Sonny only after this occurrence?  How does the concept of "grace" figure in to the remainder of the story?  Does grace's presence or lack thereof enhance the feeling of alienation in this story, or offer a redemption from it?  How so and why?

2nd Day - still alive!

NLR Japan Excursion: Two teachers from ATA Karate of North Little Rock for our tae-kwon-do lessons - thank you!! - and a study of Hollywood ninjas versus real ninjas of history.

UB Spanish: reviewed all terms introduced yesterday; declared a winner in our "label-the-class" race

UB Literature: Discussed the poem "In the Orchard" by Muriel Stuart, as well as Raymond Carver's short story "Cathedral." 

Homework: get your copy of James Baldwin's story "Sonny's Blues" from your RA, (I had a showdown with the copy machine to get those printed before class... I lost).  You have until Thursday to read it.  Don't procrastinate - it's long, but worth it!