3/24/17 Elias Frieling

Today in English, something was wrong. Sitting at the desk was the not Sparta High School teacher of the year, Brent Rivers, it was a sub. Our assignment for the day was on google classroom. We had to SOAPSTone a poem by Langston Hughes, Let America be America again. The poem was pretty long, about 4 pages so there was lots of work to do. The speaker of the poem was not just one person but many. The speaker claimed that, “I am the poor white, I am the Negro, I am the red man, I am the immigrant.” The speaker is different than the author because obviously the author cannot simultaneously be white, black, and native american. After a quick google search to learn about the author was I found that Langston Hughes was a black poet in the early 1900s. As for the occasion of the poem it seemed to me that it was to highlight the injustices some Americans face. How some Americans do not experience freedom and equality. He talks about blacks being slaves, native americans being pushed off their lands. We continued to work all period on annotating the document with SOAPSTone finding the speaker, occasion, audience, purpose, subject, and tone. We also found and analyzed the impact of its rhetorical devices in the poem. Overall class today was fairly easy, we did not do anything new, just practicing SOAPSTone.