November 2, 2015

The drive to work this morning reminded me of Carl Sandburg's poem "Fog."

Today's Board

We started class with 15 minutes of independent reading time. I'm still working through Brave New World. Science fiction always fascinates me because I wonder how the author knew where we were headed.

We read "Too Much Sitting Is Killing You" for our Writer's Notebook entry. Students responded to the article with more ways people can increase their activity levels. It was good to see many students challenge what the article was saying--they felt the author left some information out. Here are some videos on the topic.

• Why Sitting Too Much Can Kill You!
• Are You Sitting Too Much?
• 9 Tips To Save Your Life

We continued our journey through retellings, looking at the original source for "The Demon Lover." Students read the ballad, concentrating on what is actually happening in the story and who the characters are. In groups, they discussed how the ballad altered or enhanced their understanding of Bowen's "The Demon Lover," the story we worked with last week, and they recalled familiar retellings like the stories of Romeo and Juliet and Beauty and the Beast. We finished the period by studying other versions of "The Daemon Lover" ballad (243F is the version most like the one in our book), including Bob Dylan's "The House Carpenter."