Action List: 3.29.2011

First, some class notes:
1. Reading logs/blogs are due today for period 3.
2. Because the recitation "playbook" is due tomorrow for your memorized poem, please bring a hard copy of it to class, formatted the way I showed you in class. An example and instructions are on the class notes page.

Okay, here is our online fun for today. We're going to browse the online edition of Sunday's youth-dedicated edition of the New York Times Magazine. Please add the label "Tuesday Response" to your post for today and all future Tuesday blog assignments.

For today's blog assignment, you need to read and respond to at least two articles. First, follow the prompts for #1, below. After that, choose one of the following two prompts.

1. (Everyone do this one!) Listen to a few of these interviews of high school seniors about where they see themselves ten years from now. Use headphones if you have them, because they have audio.

Write a brief response that discusses your reaction to the interviews you see: Which student in the article do you relate to the most? Which one is the most interesting? Which one seems the most deluded? Then, in a second paragraph, write your own answer to that question: where do you see yourself in ten years?Next, choose one of the following options:

Respond informally, in at least 250 words, with your thoughts about one of the following articles, and incorporating at least two quotes from the article into your response:

2. "A Soccer Phenom Puts the 'I' in Team," an article with videos about a high school specialist in "free-style" soccer. Don't just watch the video--read the article; it's interesting.

3. "Online Poker's Big Winner," about a 21 year-old multi-millionaire online poker player.

"Late Echo," John Ashbery

Alone with our madness and favorite flower

We see that there really is nothing left to write about.

Or rather, it is necessary to write about the same old things

In the same way, repeating the same things over and over

For love to continue and be gradually different.

Beehives and ants have to be re-examined eternally

And the color of the day put in

Hundreds of times and varied from summer to winter

For it to get slowed down to the pace of an authentic

Saraband and huddle there, alive and resting.

Only then can the chronic inattention

Of our lives drape itself around us, conciliatory

And with one eye on those long tan plush shadows

That speak so deeply into our unprepared knowledge

Of ourselves, the talking engines of our day.

"Modern Love," John Keats

And what is love? It is a doll dress’d up

For idleness to cosset, nurse, and dandle;

A thing of soft misnomers, so divine

That silly youth doth think to make itself

Divine by loving, and so goes on

Yawning and doting a whole summer long,

Till Miss’s comb is made a pearl tiara,

And common Wellingtons turn Romeo boots;

Then Cleopatra lives at number seven,

And Antony resides in Brunswick Square.

Fools! if some passions high have warm’d the world,

If Queens and Soldiers have play’d deep for hearts,

It is no reason why such agonies

Should be more common than the growth of weeds.

Fools! make me whole again that weighty pearl

The Queen of Egypt melted, and I’ll say

That ye may love in spite of beaver hats.

"History of Desire," Tony Hoagland

When you're seventeen, and drunk
on the husky, late-night flavor
of your first girlfriend's voice
along the wires of the telephone

what else to do but steal
your father's El Dorado from the drive,
and cruise out to the park on Driscoll Hill?
Then climb the county water tower

and aerosol her name in spraycan orange
a hundred feet above the town?
Because only the letters of that word,
DORIS, next door to yours,

in yard-high, iridescent script,
are amplified enough to tell the world
who's playing lead guitar
in the rock band of your blood.

You don't consider for a moment
the shock in store for you in 10 A.D.,
a decade after Doris, when,
out for a drive on your visit home,

you take the Smallville Road, look up
and see RON LOVES DORIS
still scorched upon the reservoir.
This is how history catches up—

by holding still until you
bump into yourself.
What makes you blush, and shove
the pedal of the Mustang

almost through the floor
as if you wanted to spray gravel
across the features of the past,
or accelerate into oblivion?

Are you so out of love that you
can't move fast enough away?
But if desire is acceleration,
experience is circular as any

Indianapolis. We keep coming back
to what we are—each time older,
more freaked out, or less afraid.
And you are older now.

You should stop today.
In the name of Doris, stop.

"For My Daughter," Daivd Ignatow

When I die choose a star
and name it after me
that you may know
I have not abandoned
or forgotten you.
You were such a star to me,
following you through birth
and childhood, my hand
in your hand.

When I die
choose a star and name it
after me so that I may shine
down on you, until you join
me in darkness and silence
together.

"Feeding Hunger," Sandra Lee Smith

"Feeding Hunger"

How do we begin to justify
Hunger of the masses
When we have so much,
And so much is wasted?
My refrigerator is full
As is the pantry;
You can’t get another vegetable
Or pieces of fruit
Or box of cereal
On the shelves.
The children arrive
And know where to find
Juice boxes and bags of chips
To snack on.
The freezer is filled
With frozen bricks of various soups.
We could go, I estimate,
Six months without
Buying groceries.
We eat well
With little waste
But I was well trained
To economize.
Even so,
Much goes to waste
And I think about my mother’s warning
About the starving children
In Europe.
Now China
Or Asia
Or Africa.
Children have been starving somewhere
All of my life.
Yet
Farmers pour milk into ditches
And burn crops.
Feed the Hungry, we are urged.
Millions are at risk of Starvation. You can help.
Eighty Cents a Day can Change a Life forever.
Sponsor a child today!
And yet
Though I sponsor a child
And donate dollars to organizations,
Millions continue to starve
While farmers continue to destroy crops.
What difference will it make
If I throw out a crust of bread?
Who cares?
Who really cares?

-Sandra Lee Smith

Action List: 3.22.11

My dog Smokey.

Participation News: Grades are updated now, unless your display name is Reach for the Moon--I have misplaced your real name, so you need to let me know if that is your online alias.

Congratulations to Artemis, Mariah Hamil, lyssa, and Count Chocula--these four were consistently the most engaged and thoughtful contributors to our ongoing poetry commentary, providing insights that were well grounded in the poems themselves. Great work. 1% extra credit for the quarter to all of you.

A picture of my friend David on a puzzle he put together.

First, a slight change to the blogging requirements: Our page quotas are going to stay the same, but your blogging requirements are a little bit lighter. From now on, it doesn't matter if you are reading popular fiction or literary fiction--you only need to log your reading three times a week. This is only a change for popular fiction readers, but it should make things a little bit easier to keep up with and still allow you time to be outside more, selling lemonade and catching frogs, now that the weather is turning nicer.

Second: I'm giving you a free week for blogging. Blogs due today are now due next Tuesday, and blogs due next Tuesday are due the week after (the week after Spring Break, btw). Only two weeks of reading and logging will be due, though you will have had three weeks to complete it. Remember, you can't get credit in this class for any books that have been assigned, in any class, any time, at Homestead. So, sorry, but no Frankenstein, David Copperfield, Lord of the Flies. Those are for other classes, right.

A picture of rain that I have been liking a lot lately.

To do today: Pick 2 of the following 3 assignments.
1. Create a personal blog post that looks back at your reading from this past quarter. What was the best reading you did? What writers did you discover? What did you discover about your own taste in reading? What did you not like? What are your plans for your 4th quarter reading? Please Double-check your pages read over the course of the first quarter and update it at the top of this post--tell us how many pages total you've read, and, if you are up to it, break it down by pop and lit sub-totals, too.

2. Best poem of the Quarter. Please make a brief post that identifies what you think of as your favorite poem from the first quarter and what you like about it.

3. Visit this site: 1000 Awesome Things. Read a bunch of them and make a post about awesome things--the ones you agree with from this site, and then name and discuss at least one thing that would be on your personal list.

4. When you are done with these things, read yer book and/or conference with me about your ATW essay.