Mrs. Minich’s Blog

For part of your assessment of this unit, respond in 3-5 sentences to each of the following essential questions from our lesson and post to the blog:

Egyptian Poetry

o EQ: What does poetry offer the study of Ancient Egypt that biographies and historical accounts cannot?

o EQ: The fact that these Ancient Egyptian poems discuss the nature of love – probably still the most pervasive topic in poetry today – says what about the nature of poetry in general?

Cairo Readings

o EQ: What does this memoir/ vignette have to say about the passing of time/ life?

o EQ: What were fond details about the Cairo he remembers? What were details about the modern Cairo he is experiencing as an old man?

o EQ: Compare “Half a Day” to excerpts from the NY Times article – do they depict the same “modern Cairo”?

Lesson Standards

ELAWLRL1.a – Language and style

ELAWLRL1.c
Relates identified elements in fiction to theme or underlying meaning.

ELAWLRL1.d
Analyzes the influence of mythic, traditional, or classical literature on works of world literature.

ELAWLRL1.e
Analyzes and compares style and language across significant cross-cultural literary works.

ELAWLRL1.c
Analyzes, evaluates, and applies knowledge of the ways authors from different cultures use language, style, syntax, and rhetorical strategies for specific purposes in nonfiction works.

ELAWLRL1.c
Identifies and responds to poetic forms specific to particular cultures.

ELAWLRL1.a
Identifies, responds to, and analyzes the effects of diction, syntax, sound, form, figurative language, and structure of poems as these elements relate to meaning.

ELAWLRL2.a
Applies knowledge of the concept that the theme or meaning of a selection represents a universal view or comment on life or society and provides support from the text for the identified theme.

ELAWLRL3.a
Relates a literary work to primary source documents of its liteary period or historical setting.

ELAWLRL3.d
Analyzes a variety of cross-cultural works representing different genres within the same specific time period in order to identify types of discourse

ELAWLRL4.b
Draws comparisons between specific incidents in a text and broader themes that illustrate the writer’s important beliefs of generalizations about life or culturally specific beliefs or generalizations about life.

This article is from the PBS website called “Do You Speak American?” - It deals with all kinds of language issues - many of which we’re dealing with in class in a lot of our poetry. The article you’ll be reading today deals with people “borrowing” language from other ethnic groups and how that has affected our language as a whole.

Four parts to this assignment:
1. Read the article by copying this link into Internet Explorer: http://www.pbs.org/speak/speech/prestige/crossing/

2. Answer the questions Language As Prestige (type them) and print. Show this to me, then put it in your notebook.

3. And finally, write a paragraph explaining your feelings on/ impression of the information in the article. Use two direct quotations (make sure to use quotation marks and put (1) after the quote to signify the page number.)

4. Post your paragraph to my blog.