Wednesday, September 16

Today, we began by distributing copies of Animal Farm to students, who wrote their names in them -- this is because we are going to be working on using active reading strategies and annotation as strategies for improving reading comprehension. Then, we distributed Animal Farm reading schedules -- dates that selected reading assignments will be due. All students should have a copy in their binders. If extra copies are needed, please click on the link below:

Animal Farm Reading Schedule

Then, we began to discuss the concept of rhetoric -- which we defined as "the set of skills, abilities, theories, and tools that speakers and writers use to make their thinking, and their opinions, clear and understandable to others (and to win arguments)." To facilitate this discussion, we filled in this sheet:

Rhetoric Notes Sheet

We then defined a rhetorical question and generated some commonly heard examples ("Are you kidding me?" "Do you think that was a smart thing to do?" "What were you thinking?").

Next, we discussed Aristotle's idea of three basic categories of rhetoric: Pathos, Ethos, and Logos. We defined pathos.

Finally, we watched a scene from A Few Good Men to get an idea of what pathos might look like. On Monday, we'll see if there are any other types of rhetoric going on in the scene. Here is the link:

A Few Good Men

Homework assigned: Chapters 1 & 2 in Animal Farm, due Wednesday, September 23.