As a reminder: We will be having a quiz over the first four chapters of About a Boy at the beginning of class tomorrow. The reading journals will be checked at this time, as well.

Guidelines for final poetry project:

Paper

• Two full pages
• Compare/contrast the tone of Rudyard Kipling’s “If” with the tone of T.S. Eliot’s “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock.”
• Standard essay format (typed, Times New Roman, 12 pt font, double-spaced, 1″ margins, header, title). After the amount of formatting “fudges” on the last paper, I will not accept anything that does not follow these guidelines. Better to have a shorter paper than have to turn it in late.

Poetry

Choose three of the following options (you may pick an option twice, but you cannot do one option three times):

• Four haiku (three lines with 5,7,5 syllabic pattern)
• One Cinquain (five lines with 2,4,6,8,2 syllabic pattern; no rhyme scheme)
• One (other Cinquain) (five lines of any length with ababb)
• One free-verse poem

If you wish to write and perform a song, you may substitute original music and lyrics for the other poems. If you wish to write a song for existing music, you must write one other type of poem.

Please email me with any questions.

Tomorrow (Tuesday, August 21), we will begin a discussion on the poetry analysis paper. The final project for this unit will consist of a short (2 page) paper comparing and contrasting two poems, and a creative piece (a complete song, a set of haiku, a sonnet, two songs without music, three free-verse poems). We will discuss the assignment more thoroughly in class, but the entire project will be five pages long. A rough draft will be due Friday (essay outline and solid ideas for each poem), and the final product will be due on Monday. We will begin About a Boy at that time.

Here is the list of basic poetic devices from the board today. We will begin writing on our poetry soon, so please look over the list for any terms you do not already know.

• Simile- comparing two things using “like” or “as”
• Metaphor- comparing two things without using “like” or “as”
• Personification- a type of metaphor, in which a non-human thing is given human characteristics
• Analogy- an extended comparison
• Assonance- rhyming or repetition amongst vowel sounds
• Alliteration- rhyming or repetition amongst consonant sounds
• Onomatopoeia- words that sound like the sound being described
• Poetic Meter
• Iambic- unstressed syllable followed by a stressed syllable
• Trochaic- stressed followed by unstressed
• Anapestic- two unstressed followed by one stressed
• Dactylic- stressed followed by two unstressed

[This post was WinsomeWiki’d on 5 Jul. 2009]

Mr. E sent me this link to a NY Times article about schools around the country that require students to choose a major their freshman year of high school. The individual student’s course of study is then tailored to his or her chosen major.

Would you guys do this? If you were able to take classes that would be directly applicable to your future job, would school be more interesting, or would it make you feel like you couldn’t branch out?

This is an extra credit thread. Five points to those who critically comment on this article (push the little “Comment” button at the bottom of the post). Also, if you can find more articles about this online, post them. Share the wealth, my friends.

Edit: Great posts so far, guys. Keep ’em coming. Also, be sure you put your name on the post so I can give credit where it is due.