Lesson Plan for Thursday, January 9, 2014

Thursday, January 9, 2014

1.  Hand in  "Poet's Toolkit Poem" (typed, edited, final copy)

2.  Today's poem:
           The sentence on the whiteboard is the complete poem: "The Red Wheelbarrow" by William Carlos Williams.  However, it is not in the format in which he wrote it. I would like you to copy the words onto a piece of scratch paper, but to format it into lines and stanzas the way you think it was originally published. (A candy treat to anyone who gets it right.  Hints: it has both lines and stanzas and the word "wheelbarrow" in the title is broken into two words in the poem: "wheel barrow.")

3.  Lesson (take notes):
              Creating a Newview
               Teacher/writer William Drew coined the word "newview" to refer to the essential purpose of any piece of writing.  There is little point in writing  anything that is intended for an audience unless you are telling the reader something that he/she does not already think.  Your job as a writer is to change the reader's "oldview" to a "newview," to offer the reader a new way of thinking about something.

Types (categories) of "oldviews":
          Values, expectations, reasoning, language
Ways of changing any of the above into a "newview":
           Reverse, Add, Subtract, Substitute, Rearrange
You may use this template as a way of formulating the "oldview" to "newview" switch:
            Many people assume _________"oldview"______, but, really,___"newview"__________.

Example:
             Many people assume that every UCAS student is a stereotypical nerd, but, in reality, UCAS has just about every kind of student that you would find in any high school with maybe just a little bit of nerdiness mixed in.

4.  Assignment:
               Read: "On the Rainy River" by Tim O'Brien, p. 627.
               Use the template above to express how O'Brien creates a "newview" of cowardice. Write the sentence out in your notebook and be prepared to share your answer in class.
                Also, while you are reading,  I will pass back your "Dialogue" assignment, note your mistakes and try to figure out what you did wrong by noticing how the dialogue is punctuated, paragraphed, and capitalized in the Tim O'Brien story.