Creative Non-fiction Writing Assignment

1. Write a short creative nonfiction piece. Creative nonfiction is a type of writing that uses literary techniques (like the poetic devices we have studied in class) to report on actual people, places, and events. It includes various types of writing spanning from nature and travel writing to biography, memoir, or interview.

2. Please keep this project short. It should be 350—700 words (use your word processor word count function). You will need to overwrite at first and then cut out any words that are not absolutely essential. This process will make your final draft much sharper than your first draft. Put the final word count at the top right-hand corner of your assignment.

3. Pack your sentences with fresh poetic devices and strong images. Use the five senses. Focus on capturing a few moments with words. Slow down and show the details.

4. Avoid clichés like the plague (hah!).

5. Like a good poem, your piece should have a “turn” in it. In other words, your reader should have at least one “aha” moment where suddenly his understanding is expanded or opened up. He should look at your subject in a new light because of this “turn.”

6. Please select one of the following topics:

• An old family photograph
• A small moment that became a turning point in your own life
• A moment in your life that will be in your children’s history books
• An everyday object that says something important about you and/or your world

7. If you need inspiration, browse some of the short essays from past issues of the online journal for creative nonfiction called Brevity (http://www.creativenonfiction.org/brevity/pastissues.htm).

8. Your final draft should be typed, 12-point Times New Roman font, double-spaced. Include a creative title. Make sure you read your final draft aloud to someone for final editing.

9. The final draft is due on Thursday, April 28 at the start of class.

Speaking of Figures

A simile is like a pair of glasses
set up on the kitchen windowsill.
A metaphor is Tabasco sauce
sprinkled on clam chowder.
This word
is a symbol for experience.
This line is not punny at all.
I just don't get allusions;
they are my Waterloo.
Personification sneak
into my writing every now and then.
In school I hated writing—
do you see the irony?

Quarter 4 Independent Reading List

Purpose: To help you read on your own for the sheer pleasure of reading.

Assignment: Select one of the following books to read on your own. Make sure it is a book you have not read before. You will be required to make a book poster advertising the book (details to come).

*Note: books with an asterisk have mature content.

** Note: student must have a signed note from parent giving permission to read this book.

Book Title (Author)	Reading Difficulty	Summaries
Habibi (Nye)	Easy	When Liyana's doctor father, a native Palestinian, decides to move his contemporary Arab-American family back to Jerusalem from St. Louis, 14-year-old Liyana is unenthusiastic. Arriving in Jerusalem, the girl and her family are gathered in by their colorful, warmhearted Palestinian relatives and immersed in a culture where only tourists wear shorts and there is a prohibition against boy/girl relationships. When Liyana falls in love with Omer, a Jewish boy, she challenges family, culture, and tradition, but her homesickness fades. Constantly lurking in the background of the novel is violence between Palestinian and Jew.
Upon the Head of a Goat (Siegal)	Easy	A young Jewish girl -- nine when we first meet her and nearly fourteen when the book ends -- experiences the beginning of World War II with her parents in Hungary (and her grandmother in the Ukraine). Eventually, she, her family, and all the Jews of their small town, are forced to leave their homes and await a train that will take them to Auschwitz. You can’t afford to miss the sequel, Grace in the Wilderness.
Night (Wiesel)	Medium	In Nobel laureate Elie Wiesel's memoir Night, a scholarly, pious teenager is wracked with guilt at having survived the horror of the Holocaust and the genocidal campaign that consumed his family. His memories of the nightmare world of the death camps present him with an intolerable question: how can the God he once so fervently believed in have allowed these monstrous events to occur? There are no easy answers in this harrowing book, which probes life's essential riddles with the lucid anguish only great literature achieves. It marks the crucial first step in Wiesel's lifelong project to bear witness for those who died.
**The Kite Runner (Hosseini)	Difficult	The Kite Runner follows the story of Amir, the privileged son of a wealthy businessman in Kabul, and Hassan, the son of Amir's father's servant. As children in the relatively stable Afghanistan of the early 1970s, the boys are inseparable. They spend idyllic days running kites and telling stories of mystical places and powerful warriors until an unspeakable event changes the nature of their relationship forever, and eventually cements their bond in ways neither boy could have ever predicted. Even after Amir and his father flee to America, Amir remains haunted by his cowardly actions and disloyalty. In part, it is these demons and the sometimes impossible quest for forgiveness that bring him back to his war-torn native land after it comes under Taliban rule.
*The Road (McCarthy)	Medium	The Road is set in a post-apocalyptic blight of gray skies that drizzle ash, a world in which all matter of wildlife is extinct, starvation is not only prevalent but nearly all-encompassing, and marauding bands of cannibals roam the environment. If this sounds oppressive and dispiriting, it is. Stealing across this horrific landscape are an unnamed man and his emaciated son, a boy probably around the age of ten. It is the love the father feels for his son, a love as deep and acute as his grief, that redeems this world.
*Fallen Angels (Myers)	Easy	Set in the trenches of the Vietnam War in the late 1960s, Fallen Angels is the story of Perry, a Harlem teenager who volunteers for the service when his dream of attending college falls through. Sent to the front lines, Perry and his platoon come face-to-face with the Vietcong and the real horror of warfare. But violence and death aren't the only hardships. As Perry struggles to find virtue in himself and his comrades, he questions why black troops are given the most dangerous assignments, and why the U.S. is there at all.
Sunrise Over Fallujah (Myers)	Easy	Robin's parents aspire for him to go to college, but following September 11, he feels compelled to join the Army instead. By early 2003, Robin has completed Basic Training and is deployed to Iraq where he becomes part of a Civil Affairs Unit charged with building the trust of the Iraqi people to minimize fighting. Civil Affairs soldiers are often put into deadly situations to test the waters, and Robin finds that the people in his unit, who nickname him "Birdy," are the only ones he can trust. Robin quickly learns that the situation in Iraq will not be resolved easily and that much of what is happening there will never make the news. Facing the horrors of war, Robin tries to remain hopeful and comforting in his letters to his family, never showing his fear or the danger he actually faces.
*The Joy Luck Club (Tan)	Medium	The Joy Luck Club explores the tender and tenacious bond between four Chinese-American daughters and their mothers. The daughters know one side of their mothers, but they don't know about their earlier never-spoken of lives in China. The mothers want love and obedience from their daughters, but they don't know the gifts that the daughters keep to themselves.
Good Night, Mr. Tom (Magorian)	Easy	London is poised on the brink of World War II. Timid, scrawny Willie Beech--the abused child of a single mother--is evacuated to the English countryside. At first, he is terrified of everything, of the country sounds and sights, even of Mr. Tom, the gruff, kindly old man who has taken him in. But gradually Willie forgets the hate and despair of his past. He learns to love a world he never knew existed, a world of friendship and affection in which harsh words and daily beatings have no place. Then a telegram comes. Willie must return to his mother in London. When weeks pass by with no word from Willie, Mr. Tom sets out for London to look for the young boy he has come to love as a son.
Under the Persimmon Tree (Staples)	Easy	In the mountains of northern Afghanistan after 9/11, Najmah watches in horror as the brutal Taliban kidnap her father and older brother. Will they ever return home? When her mother and baby brother die in an American air raid, she stops speaking, and, disguised as a boy, makes a perilous journey to a refugee camp in Pakistan. In a parallel narrative, Nusrat (her American name was Elaine), who converted to Islam when she met her husband in New York, has set up a rough school for the refugees. She has had no news of her husband since he left to establish a clinic in the north. The two stories come together when Najmah and Nusrat meet in the camp, where they wait in anguish for news of the people they love.

All Quiet on the Western Front vocabulary list

• seminal
• ethnicity
• ostracize
• artifice
• sovereign
• peripheral
• belligerent
• punitive
• remuneration

New Sprint System

Please feel free to provide feedback on the new class organization by posting a comment.

Seminar Quarter 4 Disclosure Document Addendum

Dear Parents and Students,

Thank you for a wonderful school year thus far. I have felt very fortunate to be working with such wonderful students and to be exploring together such interesting ideas. To finish off the year, I will be organizing the fourth quarter of Socratic Seminar in a new way. The quarter will be divided into four two-week sprints. At the end of each sprint, I will look at the work completed by each student during the sprint and assign a grade.

Individual assignments will NOT be posted on PowerSchool. Instead, I will simply post a grade for each sprint. The final quarter grade will be determined based on the grades received for the four sprints as well as the final exams and independent reading assignment. This will allow me as a teacher to assess each student’s overall progress rather than focus on points associated with individual assignments. NO LATE WORK will be accepted after the end of a sprint.

This new structure will benefit students in the following ways:

· Students will receive consistent and timely feedback on their performance (every two weeks).

· Students can focus on their performance for a manageable “chunk” of time.

· In determining grades, the teacher can take into consideration trends of improvement from sprint to sprint.

· Students will not be buried under by trying to make up late work. Once a sprint is over, no late work will be accepted. Rather than focus on the past, students can work to keep up with assignments in the subsequent sprint.

· Students’ participation in Socratic discussions during class can be factored into grades.

To help parents and students stay abreast of assignments, I will post a list of assignments for a given sprint on my class blog (socraticworld.blogspot.com). Please check back regularly for updates. I am also happy to respond to questions about assignments by email (brigham.dye@maeserprep.org). As this is a new approach to organizing this course, I welcome any feedback you may have.

Sincerely,

Mr. Dye

Extra credit: Can you find a sentence written in passive voice in this document?

Socratic Seminar Quarter 4 Schedule

Sprint 1 March 28-April 8

History: WWI and International Organizations

Literature: All Quiet on the Western Front; WWI poetry

Elements of literature: poetic devices

Grammar: parallelism; SAT prep

Writing: finish State of the Union Term Papers (persuasive writing)

Mini-Sprint 2 April 18-22

History: Revolutions in Russia and China; the Great Depression

Literature: excerpts from Red Scarf Girl or Wild Swans

Writing: Creative nonfiction

Writing conventions: MLA formatting

Grammar: commas and semicolons

Vocab: roots review

Spring Break April 11-15

Utah State Testing (CRTs) April 25-28

Independent Reading (see list)

April 29 Field Trip to BYU Museum of Art exhibit “At War! The Changing Face of American War Illustration”

Sprint 3 May 2-13

History: WWII

Literature: Maus I & II

Writing: Historical fiction

Sprint 4 May 16-27

History: the Cold War; recent turmoil in the Middle East

Literature: short stories from The Martian Chronicles; film—Paradise Now

Writing: Finalize writing portfolio with reflections

Field Trip: Hill Aerospace Museum

Review and Wrap-up May 31-June 2

Final Exams June 3-7