Recognition

Happy Birthday!Hannah!Me!

AP Language and CompositionThursday, 3 September 2015

Time will pass; will you? 59 school days remain in the fall semester.

Today’s Class: Reading, reflection

and discussion: the essays of Ralph Waldo Emerson

“Transcendentalism is more an outlook or frame of mind than an actual philosophy”

Housekeeping and Recognition Collecting…

Trip reduction surveys—distribution and collection

Annotated bibs #1 and #2

Making up work? Need to see me? I am available today and tomorrow after school.

Please keep your grades monitored in IC, and alert me immediately to any discrepancies.

The Daily Course Calendar was last updated on September 2

Ongoing Reading Logs—what are you reading, and where are you finding it?

Coming Due—do not squander time—that’s the stuff life’s made of!

Tuesday: Grammar Lesson #2

Philosophy Essay Prompt (drafts due 9/15): Pick one idea from anything we have read in this unit,

and write an essay which explains what that idea means to you. You must directly quote at least one piece of writing. Plato’s “The Allegory of the Cave”

Roy Baumeister’s “Do You Really Have Free Will?”

Bryant’s “Thanatopsis”

Ralph Waldo Emerson

“Self-Reliance,” or related essays

“Nature”

Henry David Thoreau—from Walden

Discussion: The essays of Ralph Waldo Emerson

Small Group Discussions (15 minutes) Pick twos aphorisms from each essay that you’d like

to bring into discussion: What does this aphorism mean to you?

Why makes this idea “transcendental”?

How might this “advice” be relevant today?

Class Discussion (30 minutes)

Supplemental Reading:

Read your assigned essay, and answer these questions. Be prepared to share your thoughts (20 mintues) 1. “Remember the Six Billion”

Identify Shermer’s use(s) of sarcasm, and explain WHY he chooses to use it.

2. “Are We Raising a Generation of Helpless Kids?”

Pick ONE of the four claims under “Where did we go wrong?” with which your either agree or disagree. Explain, citing evidence.

3. “’Selfie’-reliance: The word of the year is the story of our individualism”

Psychologist Sarah J. Gervais writes in Psychology Today that “such portraiture [selfies] on social media is as good for self-empowerment as it is for self-objectificaiton.” Agree or disagree? Why?

Close Reading Defining an author’s purpose, and identifying and

analyzing the techniques and strategies employed to achieve that purpose.

What is rhetoric?

The traditional definition of rhetoric, first proposed by Aristotle, and embellished over the centuries by scholars and teachers, is that rhetoric is the art of observing in any given case the “available means of persuasion.”

Rhetoric—Whose idea was it?

Socrates: 469-399 B.C.E. Father of Western philosophy and Mentor to Plato.

Epistemology and logic.

Plato: 424-348 B.C.E. Student of Socrates and founder of “The Academy”

Philosophy, logic, ethics, rhetoric and mathematics.

Aristotle: 384-322 B.C.E. Student of Plato, and teacher to Alexander the Great.