Tuesday, 2 February

Students turned in their essays on Macbeth with answers to the following questions attached:

Did ou enjoy the Macbeth unit?

Is this essay good?

How did having a revision and editing guide affect your final paper?

What grade do you believe you have earned?

What kind of feedback do you definitely want?

Students returned Macbeth to the library and checked out Night.

Students wrote about how these words made them feel: family, faith; Romani; gypsy; Transylvania; Jewish, and Holocaust

Students were given the following homework assignment:

Freedom to Breathe

By Alexander Solzhenitsyn

A shower fell in the night and now dark clouds drift across the sky, occasionally sprinkling a fine film of rain.

I stand under an apple-tree in blossom and I breathe.  Not only the apple-tree but the grass round it glistens with moisture; words cannot describe the sweet fragrance that prevades the air. Inhaling as deeply as I can, the aroma invades my whole being; I breathe with my eyes open, I breathe with my eyes closed – I cannot say which gives me the greater pleasure.

This, I believe is the single most precious freedom that prison takes away from us: the freedom to breathe freely, as I now can.  No food on earth, no wine, not even a woman’s kiss is sweeter to me than this air steeped in the fragrance of flowers, of moisture and freshness.

No matter that this is only a tiny garden, hemmed in by five-storey houses like cages in a zoo. I cease to hear the motorcycles backfiring, the radios whining, the burble of loudspeakers. As long as there is fresh air to breathe under an apple-tree after a shower, we may survive a little longer.

1) Solzhenitsyn says that words cannot describe the sweet fragrance of an apple tree and the grass round it. The single most precious freedom that prison takes away is “the freedom to breathe freely” says Solzhenitsyn.

Questioins:

1) What does the speaker in “Freedom to Breath” say words cannot describe?

2) What do the details of setting in the last paragraph of “Freedom to Breathe”  emphasize about the speaker’s view of freedom?

3) How does this piece make you feel and why?

“Laments of the War Dead” (excerpt) Yehuda Amichai page 1383

Identifying

1) What is the speaker’s first answer to the opening question?  What is he wearing as he stands in the cemetery?

2) What two statements does the speaker make about graveyards?  What does he not know about the inscription on the small brick tablet?

3) In lines 13-23 what does the speaker request?  What comparison does he make?

How would you describe the speaker’s attitude until line 17?  What growing realization on the speaker’s part is traced by the incremental repetition in lines 1, 13-14, and 18?