higher, nat 5

Update for New Higher and some advice

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Hi guys,

here’s the power-point with the information about how the New Higher did last year to help you consolidate your notes. Next week in Higher English, we’re going to be looking at Reflective writing, Cone-gatherers and, as ever, close reading.  At National 5, we will be doing close-reading and Sailmaker. I want all of you to think about what we spoke about today and I’m looking to see you all turn up to school on Monday with renewed vigour and zealous attitude to your work.

Thinking about our chat, I think it’s important to remember that whilst I’m giving you this advice about your performance in English, it’s important to be applying the same energy and dedication to all your subjects. Higher, you have a lot to prove this year – don’t repeat the same mistakes that may have cropped up last year.  Lack of motivation, disorganisation, and apathy is a sure fire-way to fail. If you experienced that disappointment in your stomach when you opened your results last year; then put in the extra effort and commitment that is required so that you don’t feel that feeling again. Similarly, if you did well, remember that these qualifications are the next step up, and if you want to feel that burst of pride and elation when you open your envelope again, then you have to be working solidly to achieve it.

 

National 5: You need to be reading this and making sure that you all get the good option when you open that fated envelope.

You all can do this, but you, and only you,  must have the grit, dedication and passion to succeed. I genuinely do believe in you. Go make yourself, and me, proud!

New Higher update

Miss Purdon 🙂

higher

‘Mid Term Break Critical Essay – Due 24/11/2015

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Choose a poem which describes an emotional situation. Give a brief description of the situation and show how the poet explains the emotions involved.

Introduction following TARTSS structure

Paragraph 1 – Describe the situation (Referring to first part of essay question)

The Title

  • Shows the irony of the poem
  • Expect a normal, happy school holiday
  • Reality is a forced break caused by his brother’s death

Paragraph 2 – First emotion – isolation

Seamus Heaney’s poem deals with a range of emotions but the theme of isolation is present from the beginning of the poem. The speaker has to spend most of his day seemingly waiting alone:

‘I sat all morning in the college sick bay’

Heaney’s use of the first person pronoun ‘I’ instead of ‘we’ instantly establishes the notion of the boy waiting alone. As this is the first word in the whole poem, it places a focus on the speaker as isolated. As we know ‘Midterm Break’ is an autobiographical poem, we can surmise that the speaker is male. He is not only waiting alone but waiting in the ‘college sick bay’ connotes the idea of sickness and unpleasantness; this foreshadows what is to come later in the poem. The bells are ‘knelling’ and Heaney’s word choice here is significant. Knelling bells are normally heard at funerals and have connotations of death. As the boy is sitting alone, in an unpleasant surrounding, hearing funereal bells, the reader is immediately alerted to not only the theme of grief, but also the theme of isolation. We feel sympathetic to the boy as he waits, picked up by neighbours, to be taken home where the body of his little brother awaits him.

The theme of isolation is further strengthened later in the poem when the speaker finally learns about the death of his brother. Heaney’s word choice is suggestive of isolation when he writes:

‘With the corpse, stanched and bandaged by the                                               nurses’

The poet’s use of the word ‘corpse’ has connotations of death and decay. These are unusual connotations to give to a sibling so it suggests that the speaker feels a sense of detachment towards the body of his brother – perhaps he is in disbelief about his death. Ultimately, the detachment the speaker feels towards ‘the corpse’ is emblematic of the emotion of isolation and suggests not only the literal distance between the two brothers – one dead, one alive, but also the emotional disconnection as he seems to be detached from his grief.

Paragraph 3 – reader (and speaker) in suspense as ignorant as to who has died

Paragraph 4 – inexperience / uncertainty (About the way adults treat him)

Paragraph 5 – grief – Parents’ grief

Paragraph 6 – speaker’s grief/loss – goes from controlled/detached to guilt?

Conclusion

 

nat 5

TARTSS

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For ANY essay at National 5 we need to make sure our introduction contains TARTSS.

  • We need to have:
  • Title of the text
  • Author
  • REFER TO TASK
  • Summary of plot leaning towards task of no more than three sentences
  • Signpost about what is to come in the rest of the essay (Thanks Joe Hartley for that one!)

tarts colour

 

Here’s a copy of the slide we annotated to help you remember this. This is the structure of every critical essay introduction you should follow. This is also applicable to Higher English too.

 

All, higher, nat 5

Zombies!

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Apologies N5 and Higher for my absence today; I had to deal with a potential zombie invasion. That sounds like complete rubbish — but it’s true.

I know some of you saw me around the school so I just wanted to post and update you. The S1’s were working with their registration teachers (I’m representin’ 1B) and each other to develop their problem solving skills and teamworking abilities. I was helping them to create a suit to protect against the scary mingling zombies who infect by spitting, vomiting or biting you. Who knew?

Here’s some pictures for your perusal:

image image

Hope your lesson was ok! Catch up with you all tomorrow.

Miss Purdon

 

conegatherers, higher

Cone Gatherers – Chapter 1 Mind Maps

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Higher have been working hard over the past few lessons and got to crack open the brand new(!) felt tip pens. Groups only focused on Jenkin’s opening chapter and they looked at different themes; conflict, war, class. They also found evidence for symbolism in chapter 1: the silver trees separating the big house from the cone gatherers, the tree of madness growing inside Duror and the rabbit. Pupils also looked at character work and the importance of setting in chapter one and they thought about how the allusions to Garden of Eden contrasted with the threat of war.

All in all, loads to think about in chapter one – it could very well be the extract you are given in your Higher exam! – and I have included some examples for you to check/print out for your notes.

duror2
Comprehensive notes about our first impressions of John Duror
symbolism
Some symbolism work with a rather lovely tree…
duror1
A fantastically creative mind-map about John Duror – we learn a lot about Duror in chapter 1.
settiing
Some good notes on the setting with analysis.

 

Can’t wait for your visual representation of novel to be finished too,

Miss Purdon

nat 5

Be ambitious!

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After today’s lesson where you worked hard – and all got to Merit-Land – you learned about a phrase that I didn’t hear about until university. I think that you should be stretching yourselves as much as possible and I think National 5 English is a fantastic opportunity for you to spread your wings.

Exploring and analysing your own language can sometimes be a bit like learning a new language entirely; it feels difficult and clunky but eventually, the more you practise, it just clicks. So here’s a wee refresher on the term we learned about today:

In medias res: Taken from Latin and it literally means ‘into the middle of things’. We know that our story opens in medias res because Marian is sitting her second test and a lot depends on her passing the test. 

It’s not just limited to books. Have a think about other examples: computer games have it too – Final Fantasy X is a great example! Can you think of any?

In medias res is used all around you and I suppose my point is that I want you to be ambitious and not be frightened of it. Don’t think that because it’s in Latin that you can’t learn it – I bet you never thought you could understand photosynthesis or Pythagoras (Greek by the way!) when you first heard those words, but you did!

Great effort today,

Miss Purdon

 

conegatherers, higher

Cone Gatherer’s Summary Ch 1 & 2

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Higher,

Summary of what we have read so far. Feel free to write it into your notes but it will be provided in a study park nearer exams. Here for your reference though.

Chapter 1

The brothers, Neil and Calum, are high in the trees gathering cones. The wood is to be cut down for the war and will be re-seeded with the cones. Calum is clearly completely at home in the trees whilst Neil is less assured. Calum helps his brother down. On the ground, Calum’s deformity makes him clumsy.

Calum is compassionate to animals, sensitive to their pain and has caused the brothers to fall foul of the keeper, Duror, because Calum has released rabbits from the keeper’s traps. Duror hates both brothers but especially Calum. He wants them out of the wood.

When the brothers come across a snared rabbit with its front paw broken, Calum is upset at the animal’s plight but cannot kill it – not even to put it out of its misery. Duror kills the rabbit with a single blow.

Duror, in ‘an icy sweat of hatred’ (p 11) watches them and aims his gun at ‘the feeble minded hunchback grovelling over the rabbit.’ (This is typical of the way he refers to Calum.) The wood which has been his refuge has become polluted for him by this ‘freak’. If he pulled the trigger, ‘the last obscene squeal of the killed dwarf would have been for him, he thought, release too, from the noose of disgust and despair drawn, these past days, so much tighter.’ (p 11) He says that they are defiling the area around their hut with refuse; he calls them sub-human; and he spies on them obsessively.

The dominant emotion of these early pages is Duror’s savage hatred of the brothers.

Chapter 2

Duror meets the local doctor , Dr Matheson, who seems preoccupied by food – or the lack of it due to wartime restrictions and rationing. However, the doctor is shrewd and suspects that Duror is hiding seething emotions behind an apparently calm surface.

Duror’s home-life is desperately unhappy. His wife, Peggy, is grossly fat and bed-ridden and, in her own way, deformed: ‘The sweetness of her youth still haunting amidst the great wobbling masses of pallid fat that composed her face added to her grotesqueness a pathos that often had visitors bursting into unexpected tears.’ (p 25)

‘Her wheedling voice reminded him of the hunchback’s.’ (p 25)

His hostile mother-in-law, Mrs Lochie, accuses him of speaking to his dogs more often than to her daughter.

Mrs Lochie tells him that Lady Runcie-Campbell, the mistress of the estate, wants a deer-hunt organised for her brother, Captain Forgan, who is home on leave. Duror sees this as an opportunity to get rid of the brothers. He concocts a plot to have them drafted in as beaters knowing that Calum is likely to disgrace himself in front of Lady Runcie-Campbell. After all, if he cannot bear to see a rabbit in a trap, how will he cope with the violence of a deer-hunt? His hope is that Lady Runcie-Campbell will dismiss them.

Enjoy,

Miss Purdon

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