Summer Assignments 2014
English 11 Honors: Davis
In order to prepare for English 11 Honors, you are required to complete the following
summer reading/writing assignments. Assignments 1 and 3 are due August 4, three
weeks before the first day of school. The assignments are graded; therefore, if you do not
turn in a completed summer packet, you begin the semester with a failing grade.
There are 3 assignments:
1) The Catcher in the Rye questions
You must get a copy of the novel The Catcher in the Rye, read it (obviously) and
complete the questions that you can get from either my online classroom or the district
tab for summer assignments. Your answers must be handwritten. No exceptions.
2) Define the attached list of literary terms
I would prefer that you define these terms on individual notecards, though this is not a
requirement. I have generally found that those students who the time to WRITE OUT the
definition instead of merely typing them have retained the definition more fully than
others. A little over half of these terms are ones that you know already. You will be tested
on these terms in the first couple of weeks of school. I have separated them into quizzes
1, 2, 3, and 4. You have to have the definitions completed and with you on the first day of
class
3) Poetry Explication
Depending on your last name, you will have to read and analyze a poem. I expect you to
do this work on your own. I do not care what an online source has to say. If I suspect that
you did not complete this assignment on your own, you will redo it in my presence. I
expect that for this component of the summer assignments, you turn in both the marked
up poem and your written explication. You can find these poems easily online. If you
cannot email me and let me know. I have attached a sample of “The History Teacher” by
Billy Collins. You can see both my annotations (marking up) as well as the analysis. Here
are the poems:
If your last name begins with A-G:
H-M:
N-T:
U-Z:
Anagrams by David Wagoner
The Shape of History by Charles H. Webb
Vacation
by Rita Dove
What We Want by Linda Pastan
My email, in case you need it, is amy.davis@copley-fairlawn.org.
Summer Assignments 2014
English 11 Honors: Davis
Summer Assignments 2014
English 11 Honors: Davis
Quiz #1
Quiz #2
Quiz #3
Allusion
Antagonist
Autobiography
Biography
Character
Classic
Conflict
Criticism
Flashback
Foreshadow
Genre
Nom de plume
Novel
Plagiarism
Plot
Protagonist
Pseudonym
Setting
Simile/metaphor
Symbol
Tall tale
Theme
Irony
Innuendo
Hyperbole
Assonance
Consonance
alliteration
analogy
aphorism
aside
climax
complication
couplet
denouement
epic/myth
epithet
euphemism
foil
Nobel Prize
paradox/oxymoron
personification
point of view
Printz Award
Pulitzer Prize
refrain
satire
soliloquy
stanza
style
tone
dialect
sarcasm
allegory
almanac
anecdote
catalog
conceit
connotation
denotation
didacticism
epilogue
exposition
deus ex machina
figures of speech
omniscient POV
onomatopoeia
psychological novel
parody
plain style
prologue
pun
rhetoric
rhyme
stream of consciousness
understatement
speaker
stereotype
limited POV
Summer Assignments 2014
English 11 Honors: Davis
Quiz #4
Ambiguity
Ambivalence
Antihero
Antithesis
Cacophony
Classicism
Colloquialism
Deism
Euphony
Gothic
Modernism
Metonymy
Naturalism
Realism
Regionalism
Renaissance
Romanticism
Source (primary and secondary)
Synecdoche
Syntax
Tautology
Transcendentalism
Summer Assignments 2014
English 11 Honors: Davis
Sample Marking Up
Summer Assignments 2014
English 11 Honors: Davis
“The History Teacher” by Billy Collins focuses on the concern a teacher has for his
students’ innocence. Believing that children are too gentle, the teacher shields them from
learning traumatic material and instead understates the seriousness of a variety of events.
Using many allusions, Collins shows how the teacher instructs his students that The Ice
Age was merely chilly and that “everyone had to wear sweaters;” the Spanish Inquisition
was only “an outbreak of questions;” and the bombing of Hiroshima was like “one tiny
atom” dropping on Japan. Ironically, a teacher who is supposed to teach history is
skewing the truth in order to keep students from knowing what the world is really like.
However, what is most ironic is that the students, whose innocence is of so much
importance to the teacher, are actually not innocent at all. Upon leaving the classroom,
those kids “torment the weak and the smart, mussing up their hair and breaking their
glasses.” These behaviors suggest that kids don’t need to learn about terrible events to be
terrible, but may naturally be terrible; and that the teacher would do more for his students
to expose them to real history and its consequences in a structured and controlled so that
they might be able to be or do better than past examples.
Collins uses a third person omniscient speaker to convey both the teacher’s philosophy as
well as the students’ actions. The image of the kids’ cruelty on the playground
immediately paired with the teacher walking “past flower beds and white picket fences”
shows the reader that while the naïve teacher wishes to stop kids from losing it,
innocence is not meant to last.