3/23/17 Jake vreeland

Today, March 23rd,2017 we entered the class as normal by grabbing our laptops and getting our notes ready.  Mr. Rivers usually starts the class by getting us to shut up then asking our groups a question from the day before.  I was absent the day before so I just observed what my group said and got the work my class did yesterday.  That work was also involved in this class today.  It was a sonnet written by Lin-Manuel Miranda, he read it when he won a Tony award this past June.  A sonnet is a fourteen line poem with a with rhyming themes, which we learned in class today.   The class analyzed the poem yesterday and found literary devices in it.  Today we started going over a subject called SOAPST.  Which stands for Speaker, Occasion, Audience, Purpose, Subject, Tone.  We took down a few short bull it points for each word.  We did not get to finish and we won't be able to tomorrow because sadly Mr.Rivers will not be in school.  Instead we will practice with what we have learned so far and be prepared for him next time we are all together.  Also with the SOAPST as a class we found a few examples for each part of SOAPST we were taught.  Since there is parc testing next week we will most likely not get to finish this for a little time.  But still have to stay focus and used what we have learned so far throughout the year for the up coming testing. Here is a picture of Lin-Manuel Miranda.

3.22.17 Patricia Aldrich

Today to start class we watched James' blob fish video from when he was a freshman. It was actually so funny that everyone was laughing out loud, one time I saw Mr. Rivers laugh and his head went back, so that just shows how funny it was. Then we wrote down our objectives (IWBAT reflect on my argumentative writing process & IWBAT evaluate how an essay prompt affects an essay's outcome). Everyone got SAT essay prompts so we could see for ourselves how ridiculous and vague they used to be back in 2012. We pointed out that they did not come with an article so there was no evidence to prove your point, they also did not tell give the writer any direction to go in so they would be hard to write a good essay from. After that Mr. Rivers gave us a poem and from it we had to find examples of metaphor, anaphora, antithesis, personification, and parallelism. These are some examples... symphony of one (antithesis), our son is her beautiful reprise (metaphor), this show is proof history remembers (personification), she nudges... she is... (anaphora). We discussed multiple examples of each until the class ended and also went over the definition for each of those terms because the majority of the class had seemed to forget what all the terms meant because we hadn't talked about them since October.

Julia Orlando - 03/20/17 ( Late )

Hello, two days ago in Mr. Rivers classroom the class just finished up their essays and asked for help with Turnitin.com, citations and any other complications a student may have had. The essay, after a month of being drafted and all the hard work put into it is finally over. Agfter an outline, draft, long periods of research, the essay is finally completed and should have been done by Monday. On Tuesday, 03/21/17, Mr. Rivers allowed each student to make comments on their essay to show the qualities that were effective and ineffective in content, research, presentation, voice & style, and organization. Those were all on the Sparta Argumentative Rubric which you can find on the Sparta website or linked onto the Google Classroom. If you were absent for both days, this is just a reminder to make sure to turn your essay on Classroom and Turnitin.com. Best of luck to everybody who finally completed their paper after a long process of writing inside and possibly outside of class.
Link to picture ( Would not upload as an image ) : https://s-media-cache-ak0.pinimg.com/736x/e7/11/14/e71114a2d9ac910a9bdfb875d8f58302.jpg

Jimmy Bliss 3/21/17

During English class today, we were instructed to list items that are effective and items that are ineffective while writing essays. Since our better than the best draft ever were submitted last night to both google classroom and turnitin.com, it appears that we have a brief break from writing these such essays in class. Nonetheless, Our five main categories were Research, Organization, Content, Presentation and Voice & Style. We were split up into groups depending on our seating arrangements. Each group was assigned a marker and a writing space, and we were told to write what came to mind.  We, then, walked around the room and broused at what the other groups came up with. After this, we were instructed to unsubmit our better than the best draft ever and point to specific places in our essays as where we could have improved, and where we excelled. Using research, organization, context, presentation and voice & style, we were told to give an example of a piece of our essay where these terms were used, and comment. One comment was to be how I did well in this sentence, and the other comment was to be how I can improve my writing next time. When you finished your ten comments, you can resubmit your better than the best draft ever on google classroom. Students have until 11:59 PM tonight to do so.

Jackie Dowd- 3/21/17

Today was a nice and easy day in class that helped all the students, other than the few who had to listen to their own voice, relax and enjoy visual movie/show reviews. Lucky for me I went yesterday, which meant this day was a breeze. We watched 3 and a half movie reviews, all very good in their own ways. Although Zach almost had a panic attack watching his own review, it was very well thought out and put together. Kirk also had a very good review, but neither came close to being as thoughtout and put together as Michaela's. This review blew my mind and really showed how much can be done in one episode with just body language. Her explanations were spot on and I really enjoyed it. All the students wrote down what they thought of these reviews (yes we reviewed reviews) and voted for their favorite ones. Tomorrow we will finish Jakes presentation and continue on with our mini movie festival! 

Chloe Rippey- 3/21/17

Hello,
So for the past month or so we have been working on our research papers. A lot of time and effort was put into them and we finally submitted them last night. That is now the end of our argumentative unit I believe, and we are next starting a new unit. Today in class we went over the Argument rubric to see how we could have improved our papers. The class was split up into 5 different groups and each of the groups analyzed a topic from the rubric. Each group wrote out what would be effective in the research paper and what could be ineffective. We also translated the rubric language to a language we could better understand. Following this we unsubmitted out final drafts of our research paper and commented on our paper 10 times with effective and ineffective parts of our essays for presentation, organization, research and citation, voice and style, and content. Once you finished your comments you then resubmitted your paper and that was our class today.
~ Chloe
(here is an example of what my group did for organization)

3/16/17 - Zabrina Branning

Today in class, Mr. Rivers discussed with us how after reviewing some of our ‘Best Drafts of All Time’, he found that some of us didn’t take “Best Draft” too seriously. He explained how he disappointingly found that a good number of us did not have an introduction for our research quotes, or possibly didn’t even cite them. He also brought it to our attention that he found that if we used our time a little more wisely last week in drafting, that our drafts most likely would have looked much better. He then went on to lecturing about evidence, and ideal ways to introduce the background information. We also took some time to look at some claims on the movie Beauty and the Beast. We also read and identified the problems with a paragraph that was giving a person’s review on the movie, and the paragraph did not have an introduction to the quote or a strong analysis of the evidence following it. It was also missing an official citation of where the quote came from. We looked over and focused on some of the issues with the way that the paragraph was written. We looked at the paragraph after it was drafted and fixed three more times, as the introduction, citation, and quote were all fixed to make the paragraph flow and make more sense to the reader, as the claim or topic of the paragraph transitions to the quote itself, with a stronger introduction that provides context and specificity to the information. The final paragraph differed from where it began with the way it flowed and how the information  was presented, and the quote was shortened so that it was more appealing for an audience to read.