Monday, April 7, 2008

Fourth Hour Scribe

April 7, 2008

Today, class started out with multiple side conversations before the bell rang, but once Mrs. Moritz entered the room, all conversation seized. To begin our class session, Mrs. Moritz began to explain the horror that was our grammar quiz. Apparently, the highest score that was achieved on the quiz was an 86%, not too shabby, but for the vast majority of not so fortunate students, an 86% appeared to resemble a perfect score. Because of the insufficient quiz grades, Mrs. Moritz presented the class with an opportunity to redeem some lost points. The activity concerned the morning's announcements and was very difficult (considering that most of us do not pay substantial attention to the morning’s dealings). Then, Mrs. Moritz reminded the class of scheduled appointments with her to review our Wikified papers. Most of the class seemed to be accommodated for, but a few still remained. Then, Mrs. Moritz passed back our five question 1984 quizzes, grammar packets, and our grammar quizzes. After exclaiming her frustration with our grammar quizzes, our teacher proposed a new grammar unit/ packet to further compliment our knowledge in the field of grammar. It must also be noted that Mrs. Moritz has updated our grades and that we are all instructed to go look at them. Furthermore, Mrs. Moritz has altered our reading schedule regarding 1984; for more information on this slight change, please visit Mrs. Moritz’s teacher web page on the school’s website. Afterwards, the class became engaged in discussion about the previous night’s assignment: to comment on a question situated in the class blog (of course, dealing with 1984). Only a few students took the liberty of completing the assignment, but hopefully more will feel inclined to in the future. A majority of the discussion addressed the issue of possible revolt (especially by the proletarians) and how upperclassmen seemed more detained (surveillance wise) than other poorer inhabitants of Ociana. We discussed the importance of the absence of telescreens in the homes of proletarians. Could this reduction of surveillance promote revolution? Generally, students agreed that this could potentially generate some revolt. After the discussion, the class was granted time (around 10ish minutes) to start reading 1984 for our homework. By tomorrow, all of us should have read to page 117. Good luck everyone!

-Dennis K.

1 comment:

MattN said...

Okay, well to start, sorry everyone that I couldn’t post this as its own topic. My computer won’t seem to let me. Today we started off class with everyone talking really loudly and no one listening to announcements except for Mrs. Moritz. To bad that right after the announcements we had a pop-quiz on them. This pop quiz was more so of an extra credit quiz because everyone did so horrible on our grammar quizzes. (Woo-hoo 25/50) We then “lingered” over all of our stupid mistakes that we made and how we could have done much better. If anyone needs help on grammar or verb usage then go into Mrs. Moritz any time and she would be more then happy to help you. Next, we talked about our new reading schedule with the book 1984 and how we are going to have more time to read, but more pages to read as well. Check the schedule on the class website because some presentations got bumped to different days as well. We then had a tangent talk about how Mrs. Moritz is way over stressed with all of the grading she has to get down and the 200 some Link Crew applications she has to go through. This talk about Link Crew then led to how one can get onto A-Team and to be the teachers “schleps” for a week before Freshman orientation. Once we got back on track again we discussed the blog question that Kelsey Leas posted. It reads, “This section kind of reminded me of the Cold War with the children being spies and turning people in for absolutely no reason and other things that are happening. What are some of the communistic themes that we have seen in the book?” We about 30 minutes of discussion on this question that ranged in topic from Freedoms that people should have to how kids in 1984 are more so just robots of the Gov’t. Many people thought that the children were raised more so to be “little party members” then to be actual children. That is why it would not be hard for kids to turn in their own parents for acts of treason because no love actually exists. (but then again in this book nor do relationships at all. This lead to if kids are really born with good intentions and are turned evil, or if they are just born with no real idea of what’s going on around them and they take in what happens around them. Do they then form opinions from this? This discussion went on, as I said, for about 30 minutes, and then for the last 15 minutes in class we had free time to either read or meet with our presentation groups. It was an exciting class…

Matt Nadel :-)