Students will need to bring their textbooks to class next week.
Classwork: Dead Poet's Society--watching and discussion the movie and the idea that poetry shows us that life, love, and beauty are contained in the poetry we will read. Also, discussion of conformity verses individuality and what are the dangers of each? what happens when we are given too much freedom too soon and don't know how to handle it?
Verses of poetry/prose discussed so far include, T.S. Eliot:
“No poet, no artist of any art, has his complete meaning alone. His significance, his appreciation is the appreciation of his relation to the dead poets and artists. You cannot value him alone; you must set him, for contrast and comparison, among the dead.”
and Henry David Thoreau:
“I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived. I did not wish to live what was not life, living is so dear; nor did I wish to practice resignation, unless it was quite necessary. I wanted to live deep and suck out all the marrow of life.”
Next week we will begin by reading "O, Captain, My Captain!" by Walt Whitman, and "To the Virgins, to make much of time" by Robert Herrick, and more from Thoreau and Ralph Waldo Emerson. Some of these poems were in the movie and quiet appropriate to our poetic unit.
Reminder again: Students will need to bring their textbooks to class next week. This weekend, No homework! (Unless you have not turned in your Hunger Games Project which was due 2/21)
