The Friday Post

Today Mrs. Smith's 2nd period class welcomed a visitor, named Josh from the newspaper. He observed our class fishbowl discussion over pages 147-224 in 1984. Josh took notes about the structure of the class, the notions that our students mentioned, and the discussion taking place in the inner and outer circles. To review Friday's discussion from the Live Blog, click here: http://smith9h1011.blogspot.com/2011/01/1984-fishbowl-117-224-period-2.html. Josh made his way around the classroom asking students questions about their thoughts on the activity and the topics of the discussion while taking pictures. He said that his article about our class would appear in a couple of weeks and he will be informing Mrs. Smith when it does. 


Some key points continued to reoccur during the discussion. Some topics include: Julia's affection for Winston, what our government can access on sites like Facebook and Twitter and whether or not it affects the content of our postings, the meaning of the phrases 'War is Peace', 'Freedom is Slavery' and 'Ignorance is Strength', and whether Goldstien exists at all. The inner circle seemed to discuss the control a government has over a society for a good portion of the time. Mrs. Smith brought up the fact that in London they use video surveillance excessively and can watch people's actions. For more about this topic, click the link to read a relating article, http://www.nytimes.com/2007/07/08/weekinreview/08landler.html. 


On a normal Friday, Mrs. Smith would have given us the weekly grammar test, but because of the visitor, she let us take the quiz home and gave us permission to use our purple packets. If you missed class or lost the grammar quiz, then 1) identify the parts of speech; 2) identify the sentence parts; 3) identify clauses and sentence type; 4) add punctuation and capitalization; and then 5) diagram the sentence. The sentence: each of the girls did their homework. 


HOMEWORK: Complete grammar quiz for Monday, read pages 225-274 (section 3, chapter IV) by Tuesday, get a copy of Little Brother by next Friday (download one for free or buy a copy), read and sign the class expectations (for new students only), and finish up Loggel sections if it applies to your chapters.