Week 9 Syllabus: End of Quarter 1

WE WILL SOON BEGIN OUR FIRST NOVEL, Salman Rushdie’s allegory on free speech, Haroun and the Sea of Stories. Written after a fatwa was issued by Iran’s holy leader, the Ayatollah Khomeini, for depicting Abraham in his novel The Satanic Verses, Rushdie was forced into hiding. Last year, decades after the fatwa was issued, Rushdie was attacked and nearly killed in upstate New York at a writer’s conference. The novel was written about the importance of free speech, and is a love letter (of sorts) to his son about storytelling. Before starting it, we will finish reading several short stories and continue practicing our annotation and paragraph writing techniques.

TUESDAY, October 10

• Reviewing the work from last week. Students should have completed:

  • The pre-writing questions on a google sheet;

  • Hand written a rough draft of a paragraph on “The Wrong Lunch Line”

  • Typed and submitted that paragraph into Canvas.

• Once all three of the above are finished, students can leave class to read their paragraph aloud. Why aloud? Why

• Re-reading “The Wrong Lunch Line.” While doing so, remember to annotate:

  • Circle vocabulary;

  • Write out the questions you have as a reader;

  • Take notes on passages that would help you answer this question: How are both Yvette and Mildred in conflict with their school and the adults in their world?

• Once finished, you will read your first draft aloud. Read it slowly. Read it loudly. Look for errors that you want to correct. If you received feedback from me on Canvas, you can use that to revise as well.

• Type and post your REVISED paragraph into the squarespace blog.

• If we get done early, students will begin reading ALL the paragraphs.

• HW: Try to have your paragraph posted NO LATER than 5 pm tonight. Your homework is to READ ALL of these paragraphs, and to select the THREE best ones (your own is excluded)

Friday, October 18

• Reading a new story, “The Adventures of an Indian Princess.”

• HW: Finish re-reading and annotating the story. Pay careful attention to the “micro-aggressions” and our main character endures at the hands of her foster-family.