Friday, February 14, 2014

Vacation Work (oxymoron)

Please read carefully.

I. 
Grendel
Finish reading and taking notes on the novel by class time on Monday, February 24. (Things get pretty weird and interesting as Gardner uses Grendel to explore being and meaning. Use the blog post below for some guidance. I've also posted some vocabulary that might be helpful into the blog's vocabulary tab. We'll deal with the vocabulary in greater depth when we return.)

Make sure you've shared the Friday class work with me: your 3-2-1* and your chapter titles with me in your "Grendel in class" Google document.

*Describe the three most important events and explain what makes each thematically important; describe and explain two of John Gardner's interesting and significant strategies, techniques, and/or language choices; describe an mystery, confusion, or question about the first four chapters that interests you.

II.
Advertising, Marketing, Consumerism, Commodification, and Making Meaning
When we missed class on Thursday, we missed the last of two days of documentaries exploring how what we consume and how we're persuaded to consume affects and is affected by the ways we make meaning in our lives (our desires, our fears, our hopes, our goals, our values; the ways we live and the ways we make sense of how we will).

Here is a compressed version of Thursday's class.
1. At the top of the margin to the right are essential questions to think about in relation to this part of the unit.
2. In class on Friday, I gave you a handout with notes on The Ad and the Ego. (We were supposed to watch parts of this documentary on Thursday, but now the notes will have to suffice.) Read and prioritize the fifteen ideas from the documentary on the handout.
3. In the margin to the right are links with PBS resources related to the essential questions. (One link will take you to Merchants of Cool which you watched parts of on Wednesday. Another link will take you to The Persuaders which you were supposed to watch parts of Thursday. The final link will take you to a trailer for Generation Like, which will air on PBS starting Tuesday.)**

**Option: You can earn homework extra credit by watching one (or more) of these documentaries and by making a list of fifteen concepts in the documentary (or documentaries). (Use The Ad and the Ego list as a model.)

All of this work will prepare us for our first Q1 "Synthesis" essay some time after February Vacation.

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