Housekeeping

Writing contests are now posted on the class website;
optional credit is available for submissions—see me for
details.

Please keep your grades monitored in IC, and alert me
immediately to any discrepancies.

The Daily Course Calendar was last updated December 2

Making up work? Need to see me? Please make an
appointment.
Congratulations!
 It’s
Karolyn’s birthday!
AP Language and Composition
Thursday, 10 December 2015

Time will pass; will
you? 5 school days
remain in the fall
semester.

Today’s Class:
 Chapters
31-end,
The Adventures of
Huckleberry Finn
“I reckon a body that ups and tells the truth when he is in a tight
place, is taking considerable many resks, though I ain’t had no
experience, and can’t say for certain; but it looks so to me, anyway;
any yet here’s a case where I’m blest if it don’t look to me like the
truth is better, and actuly safer, than a lie.” Huck Finn, Chapter 28
Coming Due—do not squander time—
that’s the stuff life’s made of!

Monday

Vocabulary Log #8/Vocabulary Compilations

Portfolio Updates —please have all assignments in green
on the daily course calendar compiled and ready to
archive.
Today’s Class

Close Reading (35 minutes)


Term logs out?

From Chapter 31

Group Effort: All members must have identical answers. 15
minutes

13 minutes into time, I will give your group a number. For that
question, you will be called upon to explain your answer to
the class.
Small Groups (5 minutes)

All #2s must come into the discussion circle with three broad
topics for discussion—each of you will be expected to initiate
a discussion—write down three topics from your small group
discussion (to turn in—or -5 points)
Socratic Discussion:
Chapters 19-30, Huck Finn

Baseline Score: 30

Prep: +5

Initiate new topic: +4

Follow-up: +3

Analysis: +5

Until the end of the period…

2 open chairs—feel free to come into the circle
Today’s Class

Close Reading: Defining an author’s
purpose, and identifying and analyzing the
techniques and strategies employed to
achieve that purpose.

Vocab Log #8 out?

Term logs out?

15 minutes “It is the fate of actors…”

5 minute group discussion. Circle two questions
to discuss with your group—these are the only
two questions you can change, but only after
discussion.
 Score
and turn in
“Only a Nigger” by Mark Twain

Discuss in your groups:


Why does Twain use the words “negroes” and
“negro” and consistently put the word “nigger” in
quotation marks? One or two sentences.
In this essay, written seven years before he began
work on Huckleberry Finn, Twain clearly uses the
word “nigger” to signify the racist dehumanization
of African Americans by Southern whites. In “Only a
Nigger,” he uses the words negroes and negro, and
consistently puts “nigger” in quotes to indicate that
it is the dehumanizing word used by the Southerners
whose mob law he is criticizing in the essay.
Focus your questions around the
big issues:


What is Twain satirizing in these chapters? Think also about
how and why he’s satirizing these issues.

Romanticism and Romantic literature

Ignorance and Stupidity

Slavery

Religion

Politics

Reconstruction

Manners and “Southern Tradition”

The “Wild West”
Twain was known as a humorist. How does Twain use humor
in these chapters?
What is rhetoric?

The traditional definition of rhetoric, first
proposed by Aristotle, and embellished over the
centuries by scholars and teachers, is that
rhetoric is the art of observing in any given case
the “available means of persuasion.”
Rhetoric—Whose idea was it?

Socrates: 469-399 B.C.E.


Plato: 424-348 B.C.E.


Father of Western philosophy and Mentor to Plato.
Epistemology and logic.
Student of Socrates and founder of “The Academy”
Philosophy, logic, ethics, rhetoric and mathematics.
Aristotle: 384-322 B.C.E.

Student of Plato, and teacher to Alexander the Great.