Today we took a reading check over the first 42 pages of In Cold Blood. If you missed this because you were absent, you must come make it up Friday during lunch. (That is English’s dedicated day – the work that you need to do for this class has priority over all others during Friday’s lunch.) If you don’t come make it up on that day, you will not receive credit!

With the rest of the period, students wrote their rough drafts of their essays on choice and personal responsibility. It’s important that those are complete by the time you come to class tomorrow because Wednesday’s lesson will be all about revision.

Homework for tonight is the reading guide for the next section of the book. Here’s an electronic copy:

Reading Guide – Pages 48-74

Is it possible that there could be another reading check over this material? It is entirely possible. Hint, hint, hint, hint, hint.

For the first three days of this week, we will be working on a STAAR/SAT-style expository essay on the question of to what extent individuals are responsible for the choices that they make. (This will tie in very nicely to our study of In Cold Blood, where we consider whether the killers are responsible for their actions.)

Today we focused on pre-writing. Here are electronic copies of both the prompt and the pre-writing packet:

Expository Essay Prompt – Responsibility and Choice

WITS responsibility essay prewriting

Your pre-writing packet needs to be complete by the time you come to class tomorrow – we will be spending most of Tuesday writing a first draft, and then Wednesday we will work on revision.

I also want to highly recommend that you make sure you have read through page 48 by tomorrow in ICB. (Hint, hint.)