TODAY IN CLASS
Some time to recognize college choices. Congratulations to all!

Crime and Punishment:
Yesterday's homework discussed in table groups and collected.
Hand-out provided for "Epilogue" assignment due on Monday night

Finished "When I do count the clock . . ." in 5th; finished form to content match/but with a wrinkle in 1st.  Need to add  just a bit on sound features in 1st.

Two poems "at home" timed write:  Covered both poems pretty thoroughly in first--didn't really finish the 2nd in 5th. If you have not done this prompt yet, you can no longer do this one for credit.  For excused absences, there is a substitute prompt. Be sure to ask for one tomorrow!

So for "Mezzo Cammin"--

• note that the Italian sonnet structure corresponds to the content of ONE essential "issue" (I haven't accomplished the writing I had hoped for--"Some tower of song with lofty parapet"--because of unnamed grief and cares. It is that "sorrow" rather than other possibilities (laziness, time spent on pleasure, or by scattering attention on various pursuits).  All of this is in the octave.
• the sestet switches to his sense of his current status--at the midpoint of his life(halfway up the hill [of life], though there could be a literal hill as well)  he sees "the Past" [note the cap] as a city laid out beneath him .  
• but still in the sestet, as he reflects on the past, he feels the chill of autumn and hears a waterfall that he equates with death above him

Thus the water imagery that seemed positive in the Keats poem as his own problems seem to sink in the presence and realization of the vastness and beauty of the world becomes a more negative force for Longfellow.  He sees nothing but death looming in the future, and apparently has limited expectations for the second half of his life.

(And for both--if you didn't hear this in class--use the dates at the bottom of each poem to understand the actual situation of both writers as they were composing these poems)

Re: the rubric--these are never very exact, even when the rubric relates to a specific prompt as this one does.

But there is some language that has been repeated for most rubrics over the past several years:

9-8 essays offer a persuasive response

7-6 essays offer a reasonable response

5 essays offer a plausible reading

4-3 essays fail to offer an adequate analysis

2-1 essays compound the weaknesses of the 4-3's

Note particularly this phrase within the 4-3 description:  

evidence may be slight or misconstrued

Not clear in this rubric as usual is the following:

leaving out any part of what is designated in the prompt results in a score no higher than a 4

(here, it's "covered" by the phrase "the analysis may be partial" . . . )

In first, I returned the "Judging Distances" papers but we did not have a chance to do much with them.  We'll do so briefly tomorrow in both sections.

FOR TOMORROW

Assign the score and justify it.  Turn the rubric back in with your essay.

Be working on C and P assignment.

If you are taking the AP exam, choose one major work from last year (Gatsby/Huck/Scarlet Letter) and start reviewing it as a backup option.

Find Tess.