Scribe Notes: Thu 02.16.2012
Period 1
7:55 AM Students are expected to come into class and take out their Syntax Packets.
8:00 AM Pop Quiz 8:03 AM Quiz over
Corrected Quiz. It was open note and on the grammar lesson he gave Tuesday. Out of 5.
Khoa thought an appositive was a type sentence. It is not.
Appositive (n): a grammatical construction in which two elements, normally noun phrases, are placed side by side, with one element serving to define or modify the other.
–> John and Bob, both friends of mine, are starting a band.
?:?? AM Group Games The printer and computer were not being friends. Someone fixed this by pressing File+Print
8:21 AM Worked on Syntax
8:28 AM Mr. Eldridge is a robot with holes in his femur
Syntax Practice of the Day: Semicolons and how they create balanced sentence, sometimes oppositely balanced sentences.
“When a sentence is __(A)__, it implies ___(B)___.”
- A) Split/divided equally/in parallel/ balanced
- B) Cause/effect/equal comparison/balanced comparison/parallel comparison
As an example of why you would use balanced Syntax, Mr. Eldridge told us some stories about the end of the Civil War, when it was necessary to make the South feel not like complete losers.
In the apply section of the syntax packet almost every student took the opportunity to generalize about, stereotype, and ridicule Mountain View High School. Everyone laughed at Otilia’s “pregnant girls, awful students at MVHS” apply, while they hissed and “ooh’d” at Krisstal’s “dark students vs. Smart Rosemead Asians” apply. Problematic language abounded.
9:02 AM Mr. Eldridge handed out 36 weeks worth of The Week, a magazine about international, national, celebrity (sparingly), business, arts, and sports news. He did this to help us build background knowledge, but most importantly to bring up more important issues implied by front-page news articles. This understanding of larger issues at hand will help us gain examples to help us on our essays.
9:18 AM Mr. Eldridge talked to us about what step we should be on in our Virtue Essay. He said somewhere around Step 7 or 8. Of course, we’re only at Step 2, generally, but I’m sure he knows that.
9:30 AM Thoreau time.
Mr. Eldridge went over this phrase.
Period 3
To Whom It May Concern:
This morning we walked into class and we were greeted by a wonderful pop quiz. The quiz was based on what we had learned the previous day in class. We had to name different kinds of sentences and the parts of a sentence. Some kinds of sentences are periodic, complex, compound, compound-complex, interrogative, and declarative. Sentences are made up of independent clauses, dependent clauses, predicate, and prepositional phrases.
We then talked about the assignments we had turned in and they were returned already corrected. We had to correct our final test and re-read the questions, find the correct answer and analyze why the correct answer is correct. Mr. Eldridge gave us the opportunity to go back and redo the assignment for full credit because we had failed to follow the directions the first time they were given. He also gave us the opportunity to redo the corrections so that we could understand where we had gone wrong and so we could learn from our mistakes.
We then played a game in order to get our blood and brain pumping. The game went like this first he gave us two letter words and we had to add the same three letters to both words to make up two new words. For example to the words bang and riff you add the letter s, h, and e and the two new words would then be sheriff and shebang.
Once the game was over we worked on our daily exercises and today we worked on syntax. As part of the syntax lesson we analyzed a piece by Charles Darwin in order to understand the structure of his passage and the reason of why he wrote it the way he did. In the passage that we read Darwin uses a semicolon to compare mockers and the mocked. The reason why he does this is to show how similar both mockers and the mocked are and give both equal importance.
This led us to come up with our own thumb rule, which is a statement that is always true or correct. What we came up with was: When a sentence is parallel then it implies equal importance; as did Darwin sentence by using the semicolon. After we wrote our thumb rule we talked about the importance of things being equal and parallel. For example in any sport at the end of each game both teams shake hands and compliment each other’s hard work and effort in order to put things back into balance and equal.
Mr. Eldridge then passed out a copy of our progress reports and they are to be signed by our parents. He then went over the virtue essay which is due next Tuesday. The virtue essay is based upon our definition/interpretation of a virtue such as: honor, honesty, and sacrifice. This includes our rough draft, final draft, reflection, and any notes we took. We can receive extra credit by putting to practice the various tropes that we have learned throughout the year.
Mr. Eldridge then stressed how important it is to know background knowledge for different reasons. So he spread out several magazines on the desk and we had to read the articles that caught our attention. The background knowledge will help us when it comes to writing the essay portion of the SAT test because this background knowledge can be used as evidence in essays. The bell rang and class time was over and we all left to enjoy our lunch.
Written By: Karina Delgado
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