Monday Jan 23

Today was a pretty smooth set up for the week.

I should have talked about getting the SIS working for students. I'll post the instructions on the right-hand side of the blog, in case students forget that timetables will not be printed off for next semester.

We did read a few poems and got Song of Songs 4 for homework.

We did some poetry, too. I did ask if anyone was ready to go with their poeT presentations or their poeM presentations. We did a lot of those today.

and we watched this work of 80's genius:

Friday Jan 20

Well, we did a number of poems with the idea of "Carpe Diem" today.

We read ... or rather re-read the poem How to Live by Charles Harper Webb.

Then we watched this


and this




The thing we had to do for homework was this poem:


Pale Blue Dot by Carl Sagan

“Look again at that dot. That's here. That's home. That's us. On it everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever was, lived out their lives. The aggregate of our joy and suffering, thousands of confident religions, ideologies, and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilization, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every mother and father, hopeful child, inventor and explorer, every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, every "superstar," every "supreme leader," every saint and sinner in the history of our species lived there-on a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam.

The Earth is a very small stage in a vast cosmic arena. Think of the endless cruelties visited by the inhabitants of one corner of this pixel on the scarcely distinguishable inhabitants of some other corner, how frequent their misunderstandings, how eager they are to kill one another, how fervent their hatreds. Think of the rivers of blood spilled by all those generals and emperors so that, in glory and triumph, they could become the momentary masters of a fraction of a dot.

Our posturings, our imagined self-importance, the delusion that we have some privileged position in the Universe, are challenged by this point of pale light. Our planet is a lonely speck in the great enveloping cosmic dark. In our obscurity, in all this vastness, there is no hint that help will come from elsewhere to save us from ourselves.

The Earth is the only world known so far to harbor life. There is nowhere else, at least in the near future, to which our species could migrate. Visit, yes. Settle, not yet. Like it or not, for the moment the Earth is where we make our stand.

It has been said that astronomy is a humbling and character-building experience. There is perhaps no better demonstration of the folly of human conceits than this distant image of our tiny world. To me, it underscores our responsibility to deal more kindly with one another, and to preserve and cherish the pale blue dot, the only home we've ever known.” 

Friday, Monday, Tuesday Wednesday and Thursday Jan 19

Well, I have to admit, I did not know I haven't been updating this blog for son long.

My apologies.

Friday was a regular class day. I'll get my notes for the poems we did in class.

Monday was also a regular day, we read poems and did poet presentations, too.

Well, Tuesday was a "snow" day. Without any snow ... it was slippery, so we'll go with that one. The school was open, I was there, but all the students stayed home.

Wednesday I was not feeling well and I left an assignment for the students to do.

Thursday ... was also a regular day, we read poems and did poet presentations, too.

Thursday Jan 12

We continued in our Poetry Unit.

We listened to "Monseur Joliat" by MacDonald and some poems by Lewis Carroll. We got Pteradactyls for homework ... as well as "Students" by Antionio Machado.

We also read "Geography of the forehead" on Writer's Almanac website. What a hoot!

We also signed up for the dates for our PoeT presentation for next week.

On to Friday!

Wed Jan 11

SO ... today... Today we read poems by Robert Frost and Carl Sandburg. Hashtag Awesome.

For homework, we got two more poems, "Mother to Son" by Lanston Hughes and " Teachers" by Micheal Rosen. We peeked at "The Cloud" by PB Shelley. (careful editing by an awesome student).

We also read one of my fav poems as a smarty pants teacher I sometimes can be with this poem by Tom Wayman, "Did I miss anything",

By the end of the class, we each got to pick a poet for the Task Three presentation. I did peek and the sheet with the due dates on them ... and it was wrong.

Task Three is due between January 16 and 20th.

I did demonstrate an example of what I'm looking for in the Task Three "Poet" presentation, too.

I did Tom Wayman.

Tuesday Jan 10

So ... yeah. It snowed today. Buses were cancelled, but we still did some learning.

We read a few poems, like this one and this one. And this one





Then we read "The Cloud by" by PB Shelley for homework. Its the first 30 seconds of this video:

Monday Jan 9

So ... we started off by talking about some housekeeping stuff, namely the exam schedule:


We will be writing on Jan 30th at 8:30am in Portable 14. If the location changes, I will let my students know far in advance.

In any case, we reviewed what we had done in the Poetry Unit so far - the having to read three poems before Jan 24th, choosing a poet from the Canadian Poets List. The due dates are on the  right hand side of the blog and classroom, too.

After that, we read from Walt Witman and Denis Lee, a famous Canadian Poet. We read from his book Garbage Delight, a text from the Teaching Poetry k-12 course I had to do "Back in the day".

Finally, we got the poems "On Samsonite assembly line" and "Dignity of Labour" as the poems to study for homework.

After that, we'll chat about Slam Poetry.

Not a slam poet