Tuesday, January 26

Today, we began class by assessing your understanding of last night's reading homework -- "The Ethics of Living Jim Crow," by Richard Wright. You answered three questions: one asked you to sketch a scene from the essay, one asked you to choose the most difficult experience (and explain why you chose as you did), and one asked you to specify the "Jim Crow" rules that the narrator uncovered in the course of his experiences.

Those of you who did not do the reading answered the questions while referring to a hard copy of the essay.

When you finished, we asked you to begin looking on the "Poetry Out Loud" website for potential recitation choices (last week, we began discussing the upcoming middle-school poetry recitation project). Your homework for next Tuesday is to choose three potential poems for memorization. Three guidelines govern your choices:

1. The poem must be more than 12 lines long.
2. The poem must be from the "Poetry Out Loud" website.
3. The poem must be new to you -- not one that you recited last year.

Here is a link to the website:

Poetry Out Loud

Finally, the 8A group watched two short videos that provided more background about the time and place in which our next novel, To Kill A Mockingbird, takes place. The 8B group will watch these next Tuesday. Links to the videos are below:

The Rise and Fall of Jim Crow

TKM and the Great Depression