Month: September 2021

Deep breaths, folks We’re moving fast these days — so fast that this week’s blog is just a list designed to keep us all straight. Here’s a look at what’s happening this week:

Your best and final essay responding to The Hill prompt with text evidence from An Ugly Truth (the prompt is in the slides) is due your first class of this week (Monday for A Day, Tuesday for B) as you walk in — as are your three Seminar HOTQs  so we can kick off this week’s discussion immediately after turning in our essays.

On Wednesday, we’ll  cover fallacies and rhetorically analyze a recent email to Dallas ISD teachers from local political group SaveTXKids.org. And if you’re an A Day student, your completed personal rubric is due as you walk through the door on Wednday.

Finally, B Day students kick off their personal AP rubrics on Friday.

Important reminder: there’s no new AP Classroom work this week, but you MUST complete your missing/late assignments in AP Classroom by midnight tonight (Sunday, 9.26) to receive credit.

Something to keep us all busy this week! See you in class….

This past week in class, we dipped our toes into the college-ready magic that is the rhetorical précis — four tight, mad-libby sentences that upgrade our SPACE CAT efforts into the start of a well-developed rhetorical analysis essay.  We also deepened our understanding of SPACE CAT‘s exacting demands, kicked off this grading period’s ongoing Community Seminar discussion about just how far Facebook is willing to go to make money off our personal data, and learned just how much Mark Zuckerburg loves peoples’ faces.  In other words, we’ve been busy!

This week, we’ll continue our discussion of Frenkel and Kang’s An Ugly Truth; pause for a day to collectively wring every scintilla of joy out of MAPS TESTING; say goodbye to Paul Harvey by turning in our SPACE CAT analysis of his 1979 speech to the Future Farmers of America and writing an accompanying précis; and keep on keepin’ on with our independent exam-readiness efforts in AP Classroom. Without further ado:

This Week’s Assignments 

1. Per the assignment made in our final class of last week, it’s time to wrap up work on the Paul Harvey speech tapped by the makers of the Dodge Ram Truck 2013 Super Bowl ad to scratch the hardworking farmer in potential truck buyers. Before you enter class on Monday (A Day) or Thursday (B Day), please:
   1.  Employ the learnings from our group analysis of Facebook’s COVID-19 commercial to revisit and supplement your previously completed SPACE CAT analysis of the Harvey speech.
   2. Apply lessons learned from your group’s rhetorical précis of the Facebook commercial to write your own précis of the Harvey speech.
   3. Paste your work into this Google form.
2. Make sure you’ve read An Ugly Truth Chapters 4-6 before coming to your first class this week, and bring your three higher-order thinking questions (HOTQs) to help drive our text-based discussion of the book.
3. Write on notebook paper the essay I’ll assign in your first class of this week (9.13 for A Day, 9.16 for B). The prompt and your deadline are spelled out in our class slides.
4. Read Chapters 7-9 in An Ugly Truth and, per usual, write another 3 HOTQs for next week’s Community Seminar.
5. Go to AP Classroom and complete the fresh video, reading and writing assignments marked bearing the assignment deadline of 12 a.m. 9.20 — which is midnight Sunday, 9.19 in civilian terms.
6. Complete any and all late/missing assignments. It’s progress report work, so it’s time to pay the piper.

See you in class this week! Signing off, as the inimitable Mr. Harvey did, with his standing end-of-broadcast phrase, “Paul. Harvey. [Long pause.] Good. Day!