1. Congratulations!  Oh ye of good hearts (and deep pockets)—tis the season, and our class has adopted a family. We have until Thursday—yes, I will take your cold, hard cash.

2. Housekeeping  Writing contests are now posted on the class website; optional credit is available for submissions—see me for details.  Please keep your grades monitored in IC, and alert me immediately to any discrepancies.  The Daily Course Calendar was last updated November 13  Making up work? Need to see me? Please make an appointment.

3. AP Language and Composition Tuesday, 1 December 2015  Time will pass; will you? 12 school days remain in the fall semester.  Today’s Class:  Mark Twain’s “Advice to Youth”  Mark Twain Tonight!

4. Coming Due—do not squander time— that’s the stuff life’s made of!  Tomorrow: Bring your ancillary reading packet, and Huck Finn.  Thursday/Friday:  Part II: The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, Chapters 19-30: Ancillary Reading: Lionel Trilling’s “The Greatness of Huckleberry Finn” —tii upload required for questions

5. Today’s Class  Mark Twain’s “Advice to Youth”  Oral Reading  Group discussion/questions: 5 minutes  Review and Score  Mark Twain Tonight! with Hal Holbrook

6. Today’s Class  Close Reading: Defining an author’s purpose, and identifying and analyzing the techniques and strategies employed to achieve that purpose.  Vocab Log #8 out?  Term logs out?  15 minutes “It is the fate of actors…”  5 minute group discussion. Circle two questions to discuss with your group—these are the only two questions you can change, but only after discussion.  Score and turn in

7. “Only a Nigger” by Mark Twain  Discuss in your groups:  Why does Twain use the words “negroes” and “negro” and consistently put the word “nigger” in quotation marks? One or two sentences.  In this essay, written seven years before he began work on Huckleberry Finn, Twain clearly uses the word “nigger” to signify the racist dehumanization of African Americans by Southern whites. In “Only a Nigger,” he uses the words negroes and negro, and consistently puts “nigger” in quotes to indicate that it is the dehumanizing word used by the Southerners whose mob law he is criticizing in the essay.

8. Focus your questions around the big issues:  What is Twain satirizing in these chapters? Think also about how and why he’s satirizing these issues.  Romanticism and Romantic literature  Ignorance and Stupidity  Slavery  Religion  Politics  Reconstruction  Manners and “Southern Tradition”  The “Wild West”  Twain was known as a humorist. How does Twain use humor in these chapters?

9. What is rhetoric?  The traditional definition of rhetoric, first proposed by Aristotle, and embellished over the centuries by scholars and teachers, is that rhetoric is the art of observing in any given case the “available means of persuasion.”

10. Rhetoric—Whose idea was it?  Socrates: 469-399 B.C.E. Socrates  Father of Western philosophy and Mentor to Plato. Epistemology and logic.  Plato: 424-348 B.C.E. Plato:  Student of Socrates and founder of “The Academy” Philosophy, logic, ethics, rhetoric and mathematics.  Aristotle: 384-322 B.C.E. Aristotle  Student of Plato, and teacher to Alexander the Great.