We had lively discussions today during the first half of class! For the second half, students read an excerpt from the book on the Japanese invasion of China during WWII, The Rape of Nanking (the-rape-of-nanking-reading) – we’ll be working in groups to analyze that tomorrow.

Homework for tonight is to read the second story in the book, “Scar,” and complete the reading and discussion guide (jlc-rg-2-scar).

Here’s the distribution of the quiz scores from today:

The average score was an 85.

We took our quiz over the first set of JLC words and all of the parts of speech today! Homework for tonight is the first reading and discussion guide for JLC, which I distributed and posted on Friday. Just a clarification – you only need to read the first story, which is (confusingly) titled “The Joy Luck Club.”

I would like to strongly encourage you to be able to identify these kinds of errors in preparation for your quiz on Monday:

1. capitalization of common/proper nouns error
2. gender bias error
3. subject-verb agreement error
4. consistency of tense error
5. irregular verb error
6. punctuation of adjectives error
7. adjective instead of adverb error
8. overuse of adjectives/adverbs error
9. pronoun-antecedent agreement error
10. pronoun subject/object error

After our lesson on interjections (in the Grammar section of the website), we performed the play version of the Penelopiad! There’s no homework for this weekend, but I went ahead and gave you the homework for Monday night (so, due on Tuesday): (jlc-rg-1-the-joy-luck-club).

Please remember to study for your quiz on Monday! It will cover only the Joy Luck Club Vocabulary List 1, but all of the different parts of speech.

We had a nice discussion today over the second part of the Penelopiad! After that, we went over the lesson on prepositions, which is available under the Grammar section of the website. Please remember that we will have a quiz on Monday – it will cover the Joy Luck Club Vocabulary List 1 words and ALL of the parts of speech (with a focus on conjunctions, prepositions, and interjections).

No homework for tonight! 🙂

We had some lively discussions about the Penelopiad today! Homework for tonight is the second part of that reading (the-penelopiad-the-maids and the-penelopiad-part-2-reading-guide). We also talked about the Joy Luck Club Vocabulary List 1, which is of course posted under the Vocabulary section of the class website. We’ll have a quiz over that on Monday.

Today we began reading an excerpt from Margaret Atwood’s Penelopiad to get a women’s perspective on the Odyssey (the-penelopiad-penelope and the-penelopiad-part-1-reading-guide). Homework is to finish whatever you did not complete in class!

Here is how students performed overall:

Today we took our Odyssey exam! No homework for tonight. We will have an extra credit movie this Friday; it will be Snowflower and the Secret Fan in preparation for our next book, which will be The Joy Luck Club!