Monday, January 25th

Starter 1.25: Vocabulary fun: "Transience" and "Entropy"

OMG, you guys. It actually is. Mind blown....

Some of you did not complete Friday's assignment to make an interpretive claim about "The Summer Day"! Please still do so. This type of claim is central to many assignments moving forward. Here are some good ones from a few of you:

• In "The Summer Day," Oliver distills a striking revelation that the beauty of the natural world in the present moment is a significant purpose to life itself.
• In the "The Summer Day", the reader is prompted to realize that the purpose of life is nothing more than the beauty of now.
• In "The Summer Day," Oliver expresses how she feels like life doesn't have specific meaning to it, so you need to make your own meaning through the beauty of your experiences.
• Mary Oliver's poem "The Summer Day" highlights the importance of appreciating the small beauties of life so that we do not waste the fleeting time that we have to experience it.
• Mary Oliver's 'The Summer Day' is an ode to the freedom that one can experience when they come into contact with the absurd; she speaks to the mindset of enjoying the pure existence that you embody.

Your Life on Earth JOURNAL #7: Transience and Jason Silva's "Existential Bummer"

Where does Jason Silva's message hit you? Respond how you will or freewrite on one of the following options:

1. As you are working through your own meaning-making, how do the concepts of "transience" and/or "entropy" factor in for you? Does it fill you will melancholy? Nostalgia? The will to "love harder" and try to hold on to the moment?

OR 

2. SPICY OPTIONAL EXTENSION:Read Dylan Thomas' "Do Not Go Gentle Into that Good Night" and reflect on its meaning and impact. Do you agree with the poem's message? Or do you tend to agree more with Macbeth's bleak outlook? (Or perhaps you just want to laugh at the cosmic joke like the botanist in "Mold of the Earth"?)

ANNOUNCEMENTS AND TO-DO

• If you forgot on Friday, please do the interpretive claim for the Mary Oliver poem.
• Journal #7 DUE WEDNESDAY
• Read the assigned chapters for Into the Wild and get ready for tomorrow's literature circle meeting. See the assignment description for the prewrite guidelines.
• Stranger than Fiction deadline extended until Friday! See assignment description for instructions and writing prompt. The goal here is to make an interpretive claim that (hopefully) connects the film to existentialism.
• HONORS: We will check in this Thursday after the whole class Meet.
• Come to the regular Meet tomorrow and we will break out into smaller groups to discuss the literature!