Wacky Wednesday, September 15, 2010

Here is today’s agenda. First in English Class today, we talked about any questions we had about SAT Lesson Three. Some one asked what to do on Exercise 3 (p. 41 #s 1, 2, 3, 4).Here are the answers. What is in blue is how we got the answers. Semi-colons separate parts of the question. Commas separate different possible answers.

1. Look at the roots listed above: plunge, under; to come out of something; bringing something together; important, necessary; able to connect; to carry together
2. "translate" can be broken down into the following roots: trans:across, through; lat: to carry. So "translate" means: to carry across
3. elated; transfer, transpose
4. "integr" means "whole" so...integrity; look at the roots again...we want to use “co”... correlate, collect; dismantle, disintegrate
5. Sentence, adolescence, presents, entrance, ignorance, etc.

We then watched the videos for the Dagger Scene of Macbeth (Act II, Scene 1, Lines 33-64). A comparison paper is due Monday (I'll talk about that more below). These outlines are the choices we have for our final Macbeth paper (so do a good job on them!). Here’s my notes from the movies:

Royal Shakespeare Company

• Dark room
• Fog in background
• Macbeth mutters his words throughout the scene
• He appears to be very scared
• Seems to be literally seeing a dagger
• He then pulls out a real dagger
• The scene has a creepy feeling
• A hand bell sounds
• Rolls up sleeve as if he is going to murder the king soon after
• We don’t actually see him murder the king
• Appears as if he is close to mental breakdown

English Shakespeare Company

• Urban setting
• Setting is around a fire escape
• Macbeth thinks half the lines, says the other half
• Not whispering
• Seems to be literally seeing a dagger
• Pulls out dagger at same time as RSC version
• A church bell sounds
• Camera shot from top of fire escape shows him walking up right before murder
• Doesn't show him actually killing Duncan

Roman Polanski

• Seems to be outside the castle in the dark
• Imagined dagger is shown on the screen as if the viewer is inside Macbeth's mind
• Dagger is shiny
• Dagger floats above him
• He then draws the real one, but the imagined one still floats in front of him
• He thinks later part of the lines
• Actually shows Lady Macbeth pulling church bell
• Shows servants passed out on the ground, wine spilled all over
• Grabs servant's daggers
• Shows Macbeth entering King’s chamber
• Pulls covers off king using dagger
• King Duncan awakens
• Macbeth stabs him repeatedly
• Crown falls on grown (symbolic)
• King covered in blood
• Macbeth again stabs king in neck (to make sure he's dead)

We then talked about the outline that is due Monday.  We’re just comparing the dagger scenes.  Here’s the outline for our outline:

1. Intro
1. Attention Getter
2. Background Info
3. Thesis (3 points of comparison) - could include: tone of voice, attention to dagger, camera work, setting, costumes, sound effects, music
2. Body Paragraph
3. Body Paragraph
4. Body Paragraph
5. Conclusion

We are just doing a detailed outline, not any full writing of the paragraphs.
A couple of tips from Ms. Smith:

• Pay attention to when there is a dagger and when there is not in the movies
• In any paper if you write "In the Royal Shakespeare Company (RSC)..."  you can then refer to it as "RSC" throughout the remainder of the paper

Our homework is:

• To finish Lord of the Flies by Monday (annotations due the Monday after that)
• Finish Lesson 3 of SAT book by Friday
• Peer Editing of our outline that was due Monday is due TOMORROW
• Dagger Scene Outline Due Monday 

That's all we did in class today! Have a great day!