Below you will find the following:
1. Packet One Assignment
2. Packet Two Assignment
3. Unacceptable Errors handout, distributed today in class
4. Oral Presentation Assignment, distributed in class today
5. Sample Q & Comment Student Response, distributed today in class.
READING PACKET #1 (four poems)
“Taking my Son to School”
by Eamon Grennan
(do a google search of the above poem exactly as it is written above. The first posting will be a commencement speech give by Mr. Grennan. Open this and you will see the poem right at the beginning of the speech. Focus only on the poem, not the speech)
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"One Home”
By William Stafford
Mine was a Midwest home—you can keep your world.
Plain black hats rode the thoughts that made our code.
We sang hymns in the house; the roof was near God.
The light bulb that hung in the pantry made a wan light,
but we could read by it the names of preserves—
outside, the buffalo grass, and the wind in the night.
A wildcat sprang at Grandpa on the Fourth of July
when he was cutting plum bushes for fuel,
before Indians pulled the West over the edge of the sky.
To anyone who looked at us we said, “My friend”;
liking the cut of a thought, we could say “Hello.”
(But plain black hats rode the thoughts that made our code.)
The sun was over our town; it was like a blade.
Kicking cottonwood leaves we ran toward storms.
Wherever we looked the land would hold us up.
*************************************************************
“Where Children Live”
by Naomi Shihab Nye
Homes where children live exude a pleasant rumpledness,
like a bed made by a child, or a yard littered with balloons.
To be a child again one would need to shed details
till the heart found itself dressed in the coat with a hood.
Now the heart has taken on gloves and mufflers,
the heart never goes outside to find something to do.
And the house takes on a new face, dignified.
No lost shoes blooming under bushes.
No chipped trucks in the drive.
Grown-ups like swings, leafy plants, slow-motion back and forth.
While the yard of a child is strewn with the corpses
of bottle-rockets and whistles,
anything whizzing and spectacular, brilliantly short-lived.
Trees in children's yards speak in clearer tongues.
Ants have more hope. Squirrels dance as well as hide.
The fence has a reason to be there, so children can go in and out.
Even when the children are at school, the yards glow
with the leftovers of their affection,
the roots of the tiniest grasses curl toward one another
like secret smiles.
**********************************************************************
“To a Daughter Leaving Home”
by Linda Pastan
(please google the poem and you will find it on PoemHunter.com)
READING PACKET #2--(1 poem & 1 prose poem)
"Arturo" by Maria Mazziotti Gillan
http://www.pccc.edu/home/cultural-affairs/poetry-center/maria-mazziotti-gillans-poems2
http://www.pccc.edu/home/cultural-affairs/poetry-center/maria-mazziotti-gillans-poems2
*******************************************
“Flies” (a prose poem)
By: Donald Hall
A fly sleeps on the field of a green curtain. I sit by my grandmother’s side, and rub her head as if I could comfort her. Ninety-seven years. Her eyes stay closed, her mouth open, and she gasps in her blue nightgown—pale blue, washed a thousand times. Now her face goes white, and her breath slows until I think it has stopped; then she gasps again, and pink returns to her face.
Between the roof of her mouth and her tongue, strands of spittle waver as she breathes. Now a nurse shakes her head over my grandmother’s sore mouth, and goes to get a glass of water, a spoon, and a flyswatter. My grandmother chokes on a spoonful of water and the nurse swats a fly
In the Connecticut suburbs where I grew up, and in Ann Arbor, there were houses with small leaded panes, where Formica shone in the kitchens, and hardwood in closets under paired leather boots. Carpets lay thick underfoot in every bedroom, bright, clean with no dust or hair in them. Nothing looked used, in these houses. Forty dollars’ worth of cut flowers leaned from Waterford vases for the Saturday dinner party.
Even in houses like these, the housefly wandered and paused—and I listened for the buzz of its wings and its tiny feet, as it struggled among cut flowers and bumped into leaded panes
In the afternoon my mother takes over at my grandmother’s side in the Peabody Home, while I go back to the farm. I nap in the room my mother and my grandmother were born in.
At night we assemble beside her. Her shallow, rapid breath rasps, and her eyes jerk, and the nurse can find no pulse, as her small strength concentrated wholly on half an inch of lung space, and she coughs faintly—quick coughs like fingertips on a ledge. Her daughters stand by the bed, solemn in the slow evening, in the shallows of after-supper—Caroline, Nan, and Lucy, her eldest daughter, seventy-two, who holds her hand to help her die, as twenty years past she did the same thing for my father.
Then her breath slows again, as it has done all day. Pink vanishes from cheeks w3e have kissed so often, and her nostrils quiver. She breathes one more quick breath. Her mouth twitches sharply, as if she speaks a word we cannot hear. Her face is fixed, white, her eyes half closed, and the next breath never comes.
She lies in a casket covered with gray linen, which my mother and her sisters picked. This is Chadwick’s Funeral Parlor in New London, on the ground floor under the I.O.O.F. Her fine hair lies combed on the pillow. Her teeth in, her mouth closed, she looks the way she used to, except that her face is tinted, tanned as if she worked in the fields.
This air is so still it has bars. Because I have been thinking about flies, I realize that there are no flies in this room. I imagine a fly wandering in, through these dark-curtained windows, to land on my grandmother’s nose.
At the Andover graveyard, Astroturf covers the dirt next to the shaft dug for her. Mr. Jones says a prayer beside the open hole. He preached at the South Danbury Church when my grandmother still played the organ. He raises his narrow voice, which gives itself over to August and blue air, and tells us that Kate in heaven “will keep on growing . . . and growing . . . and growing”—and he stops abruptly, as if the sky had abandoned him, and chose to speak elsewhere through someone else.
After the burial I walk by myself in the barn where I spent summers next to my grandfather. I think of them talking in heaven. Her first word is the word her mouth was making when she died.
In this tie-up chaff of flies roiled in the leather air, as my grandfather milked his Holsteins morning and night, his bald head pressed sweating into their sides, fat female Harlequins, while their black and white tails swept back and forth, stirring the flies up. His voice spoke pieces he learned for the lyceum, and I listened crouched on a three-legged stool, as his hands kept time strp strp with alternate streams of hot milk, the sound softer as milk foamed to the pail’s top. In the tie-up the spiders feasted like emperors. Each April he broomed the webs out and whitewashed the wood, but spiders and flies came back, generation on generation—like the cattle, mothers and daughters, for a hundred and fifty years, until my grandfather’s heart flapped in his chest. One by one the slow Holsteins climbed the ramp into a cattle truck.
In the kitchen with its bare hardwood floor, my grandmother stood by the clock’s mirror to braid her hair every morning. She looked out the window toward Kearsarge, and said, “Mountain’s pretty today,” or, “Can’t see the mountain too good today.”
She fought the flies all summer. She shut the screen door quickly, but flies gathered on canisters, on the clockface, on the range when the fire was out, on set-tubs, tables, curtains, chairs. Flies buzzed on cooling lard, when my grandmother made doughnuts. Flies lit on a drip of jam before she could wipe it up. Flies whirled over simmering beans, in the steam of maple syrup.
My grandmother fretted, and took good aim with a flyswatter, and hung strips of flypaper behind the range where nobody would tangle her hair in it.
She gave me a penny for every ten I killed. All day with my mesh flyswatter I patrolled kitchen and dining room, living room, even the dead air of the parlor. Though I killed every fly in the house by bedtime, when my grandmother washed the hardwood floor, by morning their sons and cousins assembled I the kitchen, like the woodchucks my grandfather shot in the vegetable garden which doubled and returned; or like the deer that watched for a hundred and fifty years from the brush on ragged mountain, and when my grandfather died stalked down the mountainside to graze among peas and corn.
We live in their house with our books and pictures, writing poems under Ragged Mountain, gazing each morning at blue Kearsarge.
We live in the house left behind; we sleep in the bed where they whispered together at night. One morning I wake hearing a voice from sleep: “The blow of the axe resides in the acorn.”
I get out of bed and drink cold water in the dark morning from the sink’s dipper at the window under the sparse oak, and fly wakes buzzing beside me, cold, and sweeps over set-tubs and range, one of the hundred-thousandth generation.
I planned long ago I would live here, somebody’s grandfather.
“Flies” (a prose poem)
By: Donald Hall
A fly sleeps on the field of a green curtain. I sit by my grandmother’s side, and rub her head as if I could comfort her. Ninety-seven years. Her eyes stay closed, her mouth open, and she gasps in her blue nightgown—pale blue, washed a thousand times. Now her face goes white, and her breath slows until I think it has stopped; then she gasps again, and pink returns to her face.
Between the roof of her mouth and her tongue, strands of spittle waver as she breathes. Now a nurse shakes her head over my grandmother’s sore mouth, and goes to get a glass of water, a spoon, and a flyswatter. My grandmother chokes on a spoonful of water and the nurse swats a fly
In the Connecticut suburbs where I grew up, and in Ann Arbor, there were houses with small leaded panes, where Formica shone in the kitchens, and hardwood in closets under paired leather boots. Carpets lay thick underfoot in every bedroom, bright, clean with no dust or hair in them. Nothing looked used, in these houses. Forty dollars’ worth of cut flowers leaned from Waterford vases for the Saturday dinner party.
Even in houses like these, the housefly wandered and paused—and I listened for the buzz of its wings and its tiny feet, as it struggled among cut flowers and bumped into leaded panes
In the afternoon my mother takes over at my grandmother’s side in the Peabody Home, while I go back to the farm. I nap in the room my mother and my grandmother were born in.
At night we assemble beside her. Her shallow, rapid breath rasps, and her eyes jerk, and the nurse can find no pulse, as her small strength concentrated wholly on half an inch of lung space, and she coughs faintly—quick coughs like fingertips on a ledge. Her daughters stand by the bed, solemn in the slow evening, in the shallows of after-supper—Caroline, Nan, and Lucy, her eldest daughter, seventy-two, who holds her hand to help her die, as twenty years past she did the same thing for my father.
Then her breath slows again, as it has done all day. Pink vanishes from cheeks w3e have kissed so often, and her nostrils quiver. She breathes one more quick breath. Her mouth twitches sharply, as if she speaks a word we cannot hear. Her face is fixed, white, her eyes half closed, and the next breath never comes.
She lies in a casket covered with gray linen, which my mother and her sisters picked. This is Chadwick’s Funeral Parlor in New London, on the ground floor under the I.O.O.F. Her fine hair lies combed on the pillow. Her teeth in, her mouth closed, she looks the way she used to, except that her face is tinted, tanned as if she worked in the fields.
This air is so still it has bars. Because I have been thinking about flies, I realize that there are no flies in this room. I imagine a fly wandering in, through these dark-curtained windows, to land on my grandmother’s nose.
At the Andover graveyard, Astroturf covers the dirt next to the shaft dug for her. Mr. Jones says a prayer beside the open hole. He preached at the South Danbury Church when my grandmother still played the organ. He raises his narrow voice, which gives itself over to August and blue air, and tells us that Kate in heaven “will keep on growing . . . and growing . . . and growing”—and he stops abruptly, as if the sky had abandoned him, and chose to speak elsewhere through someone else.
After the burial I walk by myself in the barn where I spent summers next to my grandfather. I think of them talking in heaven. Her first word is the word her mouth was making when she died.
In this tie-up chaff of flies roiled in the leather air, as my grandfather milked his Holsteins morning and night, his bald head pressed sweating into their sides, fat female Harlequins, while their black and white tails swept back and forth, stirring the flies up. His voice spoke pieces he learned for the lyceum, and I listened crouched on a three-legged stool, as his hands kept time strp strp with alternate streams of hot milk, the sound softer as milk foamed to the pail’s top. In the tie-up the spiders feasted like emperors. Each April he broomed the webs out and whitewashed the wood, but spiders and flies came back, generation on generation—like the cattle, mothers and daughters, for a hundred and fifty years, until my grandfather’s heart flapped in his chest. One by one the slow Holsteins climbed the ramp into a cattle truck.
In the kitchen with its bare hardwood floor, my grandmother stood by the clock’s mirror to braid her hair every morning. She looked out the window toward Kearsarge, and said, “Mountain’s pretty today,” or, “Can’t see the mountain too good today.”
She fought the flies all summer. She shut the screen door quickly, but flies gathered on canisters, on the clockface, on the range when the fire was out, on set-tubs, tables, curtains, chairs. Flies buzzed on cooling lard, when my grandmother made doughnuts. Flies lit on a drip of jam before she could wipe it up. Flies whirled over simmering beans, in the steam of maple syrup.
My grandmother fretted, and took good aim with a flyswatter, and hung strips of flypaper behind the range where nobody would tangle her hair in it.
She gave me a penny for every ten I killed. All day with my mesh flyswatter I patrolled kitchen and dining room, living room, even the dead air of the parlor. Though I killed every fly in the house by bedtime, when my grandmother washed the hardwood floor, by morning their sons and cousins assembled I the kitchen, like the woodchucks my grandfather shot in the vegetable garden which doubled and returned; or like the deer that watched for a hundred and fifty years from the brush on ragged mountain, and when my grandfather died stalked down the mountainside to graze among peas and corn.
We live in their house with our books and pictures, writing poems under Ragged Mountain, gazing each morning at blue Kearsarge.
We live in the house left behind; we sleep in the bed where they whispered together at night. One morning I wake hearing a voice from sleep: “The blow of the axe resides in the acorn.”
I get out of bed and drink cold water in the dark morning from the sink’s dipper at the window under the sparse oak, and fly wakes buzzing beside me, cold, and sweeps over set-tubs and range, one of the hundred-thousandth generation.
I planned long ago I would live here, somebody’s grandfather.
*************
UNACCEPTABLE
ERRORS
In English 5 students should already be very proficient in word usage. We do not have time for grammar
lessons. (I will, however, provide
short ‘mini’ lessons when I feel they are warranted.) The following errors that are commonly made on student
papers are considered unacceptable.
For out of class essays, each unacceptable error
takes ten points off your final earned grade. However, you may correct unacceptable errors and receive the
points back on out of class essays, if you are eligible to revise—meaning, you
submitted a rough draft. (Exceptions: In class essays that have unacceptable
errors CAN always be
corrected to earn back the points lost. Quizzes will not be evaluated for
unacceptable errors.)
1. there – place Put
it over there.
2. their – possessive pronoun That
is their car.
3. they’re – contraction of they
are They’re
going with us.
4. your – possessive pronoun Your
dinner is ready.
5. you’re – contraction of you are You’re
not ready.
6.
it’s – contraction of it is It’s
a sunny day.
7. its – possessive pronoun The
dog wagged its tail.
8. a lot – always two words I
liked it a lot.
9. to – a preposition or part of an
infinitive I
like to proofread my essays carefully.
10.
too – an intensifier, or also That
is too much. I will go too.
11.
two – a number Give
me two folders.
12. In today’s society
or In society today This
phrase is grossly overused and very cliché. Instead use “Today” or “In America”
or “Now” etc
13. right(s)/write(s)/rite(s) rights are a set of beliefs or values
in which a person feels entitled: His rights were read to him before he
was arrested for stalking Dave Matthews. Writes
is a verb indicating action taken with a pen, pencil or computers to convey
a message: Michelle writes love letters to Dave Matthews in her sleep. Rites are a series of steps or events
which lead an individual from one phase in life to the next, or a series of
traditions that should be followed: The initiate began his rite of
passage ceremony at the age of thirteen.
14. definitely/defiantly This
error USUALLY occurs when a writer relies solely on spell-check. You really
must learn to become the final editor of your work. Definitely is an adverb and it means without a doubt. Mary will definitely
miss the Dave Matthews Band concert. Defiantly
means to show defiance. She was in a defiant mood. It is an adjective.
Or it could be used as an adverb. She was defiantly rude and sullen
towards the professor.
15. On your Works Cited page: you
MUST center and type at the top the heading just as it is here: Works Cited.
NOT ALL CAPS, NOT BOLDED, NOT UNDERLINED, NOT MISSPELLED, NOT IN A DIFFERENT
SIZED FONT, ETC.
16. woman/women woman
is used when you are referring to ONE female lady.
women
is the
plural of woman, meaning MORE THAN ONE lady
There are many women
at the nail salon, but only one woman is shopping at the market next
door.
An accumulation of the following
errors will affect your grade, but not 10 points off for EACH error. My evaluation of your work depends on
how serious the error is, and how often you make it. Some do not slow up the reader as much as others.
- Misuse of the word
“you”. You must actually mean
the reader when you use the word “you”.
- Avoid use of
contractions in formal expository writing. (can’t, shouldn’t, didn’t,
etc.)
- Agreement of subject
and verb. Both must be either
singular or plural.
- Fragmented sentences,
comma splices and run-ons. Be
sure to proofread your papers carefully before turning them in.
You
will not pass English 5 if you cannot write an intelligent sentence in correct
English.
English 5, Spring 2015
Instructor:
Catherine Fraga
The
Significance of Home
Assigned:
January 28
Due: May 11
and 13
For this
assignment, please select an article, observation, photograph, painting, collage,
film, song, poem, essay or anything else that offers some message or
reflection on the theme of home.
It could have a personal meaning for you, but it does not have to.
After you have
selected your “item,” write a minimum of one page about the item. Include a brief description of the item
and a detailed explanation of why you chose this item; include a thoughtful
commentary. Proofread carefully
for unacceptable errors as well as other proofreading mistakes.
On the day of
presentations, please do not read your essay to the class, but
simply summarize the main points aloud to the class. The presentation usually takes only a few moments.
You will submit a copy of the essay only to me.
As the semester
progresses, you may get ideas for your presentation from our readings, the
films we will be viewing, or from class discussions.
Remember that you
will not receive this short essay back nor will you receive any credit for the
assignment if there are ANY unacceptable errors present.
Please do not take this assignment lightly. It is worth 100 points.
Dave Matthews
Professor Fraga
English 5, Sec. 6
2 February 2013
“Traveling through the Dark”
by William Stafford
Q: I have no question.
C: During a very brief event on a dark country road, poet
William Stafford chronicles a very somber and difficult decision the speaker
has to make; Stafford has written a very universal poem. Even if the reader has
never been in a similar situation, almost everyone has had to weigh the pros
and cons of a challenging decision. By the end of the second stanza, when we
learn that the dead deer is pregnant and her fawn is alive, we are drawn into
the dilemma the speaker and his friends face.
This poem reminds
me of what makes life so exciting and yet so frustrating at the same time.
Whenever we make a decision, we are never completely guaranteed we have made
the “right” decision; we just make the best decision we can based on the
information we have.
The
last two lines of the poem are especially effective and very visual. The
sadness seeps through the words: “I thought hard for us all…and then pushed her
over the edge into the river.” In fact, Stafford’s careful word choice
throughout the poem keeps the reader focused and tense. Sometimes living is
very much like “traveling through the dark” without any signs for direction.
*************
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