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First Day Lesson Plans |
Dr. Bordelon's English II On
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Plan for the day
Figurative language; connotative and denotative language; metaphor; symbol. This is the stuff of literature. Introductory Powerpoint the first (and only?) Introduction to Poetry Would you prefer to be treated by Dr. One who says
Or Dr. Two who says
Explain your choice -- and don't necessarily focus on grammar. Metaphor Video on Importance
of Metaphors From Ratatouille. Visual representation of taste Emile doesn't get it "A metaphor is not an ornament. It is an organ of perception. Through metaphors, we see the world as one thing or another. Is light a wave or a particle? Are molecules like billiard balls or force shields?" (Postman 174) Examples of how metaphor affects our understanding: "Is the human mind [. . .] like a dark cavern (needing illumination)? A muscle (needing exercise)? A vessel (needing filling)? A lump of clay (needing shaping)? A garden (needing cultivation)? Or, as so many say today, is it like a computer that processes data? And what of students? Are they patients to be cared for? Troops to be disciplined? Sons and daughters to be nurtured? Personnel to be trained? Resources to be developed?" (Postman 174) Why We Discuss Literature "For example, in Charlotte's Web a decoding reader must realize what Wilbur's fate would be without Charlotte's intervention. But what prepares [a reader] to comprehend the splendidly sophisticated arachnoid reasoning behind this intervention? This phase of reading marks the time when [a reader] begins to learn how to predict from the delicate mix of what is said in a text and what is not said. It is the moment when [they] first learn to go 'beyond the information given.' It is the beginning of what will ultimately be the most important contribution of the reading brain: time to think" (Wolf 131-32). "While reading, we can leave our own consciousness, and pass over into the consciousness of another person, another age, another culture. 'Passing over,' a term used by the theologian John Donne, describes the process through which reading enables us to try on, identify with, and ultimately enter for a brief time the wholly different perspective of another person's consciousness" (Wolf 7). "For
example, [researchers] studied how the brain reads pseudo words like 'mbli' and real words like 'limb,' in which the letters were
the same but only one combination of them was meaningful. In each case, the
same visual areas initially activated. But the pseudo words stimulated little
activity beyond their identification in the visual association regions. For
real words, however, the brain became a beehive of activity. A network of
processes went to work: the visual and visual association areas responded to
visual patterns (or representations); frontal, temporal, and parietal areas
provided information about the smallest sounds in words, called phonemes; and
finally areas in the temporal and parietal lobes processed meanings,
functions, and connections to other real words. The difference between the
two arrangements of the same letters -- only one of which was a word -- was almost
half a cortex"
(Wolf 35).
"Sometimes, however, a [reader] . . . needs to know simply that he or she must reread a word, sentence, or paragraph a second time to understand it correctly. Knowing when to reread a text (e.g., to revise a false interpretation or to get more information) to improve comprehension is part of what my Canadian colleague Maureen Lovett refers to as 'comprehension monitoring.' Her research on [reader's] meta-cognitive abilities -- particularly their ability to think about how well they are understanding what they read in a text -- emphasizes the importance at this phase of development of a [person's reading skills:] being able to change strategies if something does not make sense, and of a teacher's powerful role in facilitating that change" (Wolf 132). Flood in the Brain "Years ago, the cognitive scientist David Swinney helped uncover the fact that when we read a simple word like 'bug,' we activate not only the more common meaning (a crawling, sixlegged creature), but also the bug's less frequent associations -- spies, Volkswagens, and glitches in software. Swinney discovered that the brain doesn't find just one simple meaning for a word; instead it stimulates a veritable trove of knowledge about that word and the many words related to it. The richness of this semantic dimension of reading depends on the riches we have already stored, a fact with important and sometimes devastating developmental implications for our children. [People] with a rich repertoire of words and their associations will experience any text or any conversation in ways that are substantively different from [those] who do not have the same stored words and concepts" (Wolf 9). "A written or spoken word probably activates fragments of meaning in the brain in much the same way that a tidal bore invades a whole riverbed. If you compare a word like "cheese" with a non-word like "croil," the only difference lies in the size of the cortical tidal wave that they can bring on. A known word resonates in the temporal lobe networks and produces a massive wave of synchronized oscillations that rolls through millions of neurons. This tidal bore goes even as far as the more distant regions of the cortex as it successively contacts the many assemblies of neurons that each encode a fragment of the word's meaning. An unknown word, however, even if it gets through the first stages of visual analysis, finds no echo in the cortex and the wave it triggers is quickly broken down into inarticulate cerebral foam" (Dahaene) "Literacy drastically changes the brain--literally! A fascinating brain imaging experiment proves this fact unequivocally. It shows that measurements of brain activity are profoundly different in the brains of illiterates. Although the experiment does not bear specifically on the developing brain, it sheds indirect light on the acquisition of reading by revealing the long-term impact of literacy on brain circuitry" (Dahaene) "Nicholas Carr describes it in The Shallows: "Researchers used brain scans to examine what happens inside people's heads as they read fiction. They found that 'readers mentally simulate each new situation encountered in a narrative.' The brain regions that are activated 'closely mirror those involved when people perform, imagine, or observe similar real-world activities.'" " (qtd. Jacobs 123). "As proficient readers, we all possess a lexicon of English spelling that lists the written forms of all the words we know from the past. These orthographic memories are probably stored in the form of hierarchical trees of letters, graphemes, syllables, and morphemes. For instance the entry for the word "carrot" should look like [ca] + [rrot]. But we also maintain a separate "phonological lexicon," a mental dictionary of the pronunciation of words, for instance the fact that "carrot" is pronounced carat. We also have a grammatical store that specifies that "carrot" is a noun, that its plural is regular, and so on. Finally, each word is associated with dozens of semantic features that specify its meaning: a carrot is an edible vegetable, elongated in shape, with a characteristic orange color, and so on. These mental dictionaries open up, one after the other, as our brain retrieves the corresponding information. This metaphor holds that our mind houses a reference library in several volumes, from a spelling guide to a pronunciation manual and an encyclopedic dictionary" (Dahaene) Attentiveness "When psychologists study multitasking, they do not find a story of new efficiencies. Rather, multitaskers don't perform as well on any of the tasks they are attempting. But multitasking teels good because the body rewards it with neurochemicals that induce a multitasking 'high.' The high deceives multitaskers into thinking they are being especially productive. In search of the high, they want to do even more" (Turkle 147). "Psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi examines the idea of "zone" through the prism of what he calls "flow," the mental state in which a person is fully immersed in an activity with focus and involvement.'" In the flow state, you have clear expectations and attainable goals" (Turkle 226) "'I'm
trying to write," says a professor of economics. "My article is due.
But I'm checking my e-mail every two minutes. And then, the worst is
when I change the setting so that I don't have to check the e-mail. It
just comes in with a 'ping.' So now I'm like Pavlov's dog. I'm sitting
around, waiting for that ping. I should ignore it. But I go right to
it." An art critic with a book deadline took drastic measures: "I went
away to a cabin. And I left my cell phone in the car. In the trunk. My
idea was that maybe I would check it once a day. I kept walking out of
the house to open the trunk and check the phone. I felt like an addict,
like the people at work who huddle around me outdoor smoking places
they keep on campus, the outdoor ashtray places. I kept going to that
trunk." It is not unusual for people to estimate that when at work, but
taken up by searching E-mail, photos, and facebook, they put in double
the amount of hours to accommodate the siren of the Web. "Erik Erikson writes that in their search for identity, adolescents need a place of stillness, a place to gather themselves. Psychiatrist Anthony Storr writes of solitude in much the same way. Storr says that in accounts of the creative process, 'by far the greater number of new ideas occur during a state of reverie, intermediate between waking and sleeping-- It is a state of mind in which ideas and images are allowed to appear and take their course spontaneously… the creator need[s] to be able to be passive, to let things happen within the mind.' In the digital life, stillness and solitude are hard to come by" (Turkle 272). "As Winifred Gallagher has written, "attention enables you to have the kind of Dionysian experience beautifully described by the old-fashioned term 'rapt'--completely absorbed, engrossed, fascinated, perhaps even 'carried away'--that underlies life's deepest pleasures, from the scholar's study to the carpenter's craft to the lover's obsession. [ . . . . ] And only those who have experienced that complete absorption of the self in something else, something beautiful, know also what it means to have misplaced that capacity; only we know the anxiety that arises from the fear we may never have that again. This is why attentiveness is worth cultivating: not just because it is good for you or because (as Gallagher also says) it can help you "organize your world," but because such raptness is deeply satisfying" (qtd. Jacobs 86). Diction/Reading Sensitively and Academic Discourse Email from supervisor Also, personal items like coats and bags should be kept in your lockers, not in the room. Thanks, _____ Response from supervised Best regards Academic Discourse There is severe mucoperiosteal thickening of the right frontal sinus with a bubbly appearance of sinus disease suggesting acute on chronic sinusitis. The left frontal sinus is clear. Severe disease is seen affecting the right anterior ethmoid air cells with near complete opacification of the anterior ethmoid sinuses and opacification of the right frontal recess. There is mild mucoperiosteal thickening of the left ethmoid air cells. The left frontal recess remains patent. There is mild right and moderate left sinus disease affecting the posterior ethmoid sinuses. The sphenoid sinuses are clear bilaterally. Mild polypoid mucosal thickening is seen in the left maxillary antrum. Mild mucosal thickening is seen in the right maxillary sinus. There is opacification of the right ostiomeatal unit The left ostiomeatal unit is patent The mastoid air cells are clear. The osseous structures are otherwise intact There is minimal rightward nasal septal deviation anteriorly. On the prevalence and importance of literature "most Americans in a society that sometimes seems as caught up as Bali in the making and consuming of art, still do not begin to recognize the absolute centrality of literature and language in their lives. Perhaps this unawareness is part of the cunning of our culture" (Greenblatt 8). Burke, Kenneth. "Literature as Equipment for Living." Contemporary Literary Criticism. Ed. Robert Con Davis and Ronald Schleifer. New York: Longman, 1989. 75-81. Sociological critics "consider works of art, I think, as strategies for selecting enemies, and allies, for socializing losses, for warding off evil eye, for purification, propitiation, and desanctification, consolation and vengeance, admonition and exhortation, implicit commands or instructions of one sort or another. Art forms like 'tragedy' or 'comedy' or 'satire' would be treated as equipments for living, that size up situations in various ways and in keeping with correspondingly various attitudes" (Burke 81). Ludwig Wittgenstein Aristotle Joseph Conrad on the purpose of the writer and on the
power of fiction: Walt Whitman, in a late essay entitled "An Old Man's Rejoinder" argues that context is essential to understanding any work of art: "No great poem or other literary or artistic work of any scope, old or new, can be essentially consider'd without weighing first the age, politics (or want of politics) and aim, visible forms, unseen soul, and current times, out of the midst of which it rises and is formulated" (1249). Franz Kafka in an 1904 letter to Oskar Pollak The existence of the text is a silent existence, silent until the moment in which a reader reads it. Only when the able eye makes contact with the markings on the tablet does the text come to active life. All writing depends on the generosity of the reader. --ALBERTO MANGUEL, THE HISTORY OF READING We are absurdly accustomed to the miracle of a few written signs being able to contain immortal imagery, involutions of thought, new worlds with live people, speaking, weeping, laughing. . . . What if we awake one day, all of us, and find ourselves utterly unable to read? --VLADIMIR NABOKOV, PALE FIRE "As the eighteenth-century scientist G. C. Lichtenberg once wrote, "A book is like a mirror: if an ass looks in, you can't expect an apostle to look out." (qtd. Jacobs 53) "everyone is a fiction writer, because any time you imagine what a person is thinking, or how he or she lives, or whether or not he or she finds you attractive, you're writing [ . . . ] though we like to file it away as if it's reliable information" (64) Chris Ware interview in Poets and Writers 2012. Works Cited Dehaene, Stanislas. Reading in the Brain: The New Science of How We Read. Kindle Jacobs, Alan. The Pleasures of Reading in an Age of Distraction. OUP, 2011. Print. Turkle, Sherry. Alone Together: Why We Expect More from Technology and Less from Each Other. New York: Basic Books, 2011. Print. Wolf, Maryanne. Proust and the Squid: the Story and Science of the Reading Brain. New York: HarperCollins, 2007, Print.
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