Thursday before break

Thanks everyone for keeping me up to date with your essays. I will see you on Monday after the break. I hope that your essays will be in a near finished rough draft form at that time. Enjoy the break.

Posting in the wrong place

Tonight I posted two items that are not very easy to find. You have to link to them through the dashboard. I am trying this one using a different routing to see where is turns up.

mitchella

I just want to let everyone know that michella has a good outline/brainstorm. If you want to checkout what she has done, find her spot http://mitchella.blogspot.com

Merchant of Venice Act I

How is it going with watching and reading The Merchant of Venice. My intention was to show Othello this week, but I could not get a copy of the movie. On Sunday I decided to change the syllabus a bit and substitute The Merchant. This means that we will cut The Tempest for next year and still do Othello in its place as one of the Detailed Study texts. In some ways it is better placed there anyway because the poetry and dramatic situations in Othello lend themselves really well to close analysis. And what is more, I have found that The Tempest is not very well liked by students. Although it is quite a spectacular play on stage, the ideas are rather philosophical and even theological and many find it difficult. On the other hand, The Merchant , I think could work quite well because it pairs quite nicely with Othello . Both are set in Venice and both delve into the culture of the time, looking at Venice as a military and trade centre. At the time Venice was also very cosmopolitan and both Othello and Shylock are outsiders and as such are subject to the racist attitudes expressed by the mainstream of the society. The plays both address the issues surrounding racism--issues that are of course still relevant today. Afterall, Crash won best picture at the Academy Awards on Monday night. It is also a good choice because of the new film with Al Pacino. But remember it is a very controversial play. Did Mr. Walmark tell you to check out the lPS Masterpiece Theatre site on The Merchant? It has a good character map and a good synopsis of the plot and some excellent links to essays and commentary.

The Purpose of This is....

This purpose of having a blog we can all post on, is to be able to ask questions about assignments where the rest of the class and out teacher can answer them. Also it's easier on Ms. MacDonnell to be able to come here and tell us things that the whole class needs to hear than to go to our individual blogs and tell us each seperatley. So use it. Remember that this is something for school, so keep it clean but I think we can also be a little more laid back. It's mroe for questions than anything. Ok I am finished with sounding bossy and know-it-all-ish. bye

Welcome Everyone.

So Anna and I were talking after I accidently gave Anna power to post in my blog, about how wicked it would be to ahve a big group blog that we all use. So i set one up and am inviting people to join. So here it is.