1. Recognition
Happy Birthday!
Hannah!

2. AP Language and Composition Thursday, 3 September 2015
Time will pass; will you? 59 school days remain in the fall semester.
Today’s Class:
Reading, reflection and discussion: the essays of Ralph Waldo Emerson
“Transcendentalism is more an outlook or frame of mind than an actual philosophy”

3. Housekeeping and Recognition
Trip reduction surveys—distribution and collection
Making up work? Need to see me? I am available today and tomorrow after school.
Please keep your grades monitored in IC, and alert me immediately to any discrepancies.
The Daily Course Calendar was last updated on September 2
Ongoing Reading Logs—what are you reading, and where are you finding it?

4. Coming Due—do not squander time—that’s the stuff life’s made of!
Tomorrow(Day 1)/Friday (Day 2/Zero)
Dialectical journal—Emerson’s bio and essays
Annotated Bibliography set #1—tii upload required
Tuesday:
Grammar Lesson #2

5. Philosophy Essay Prompt (drafts due 9/15):
Pick one idea from anything we have read in this unit, and write an essay which explains what that idea means to you. You must directly quote at least one piece of writing.
Plato’s “The Allegory of the Cave”
Roy Baumeister’s “Do You Really Have Free Will?”
Bryant’s “Thanatopsis”
Ralph Waldo Emerson
“Self-Reliance,” or related essays
“Nature”
Henry David Thoreau—from Walden

6. Reading, lecture and discussion: The essays of Ralph Waldo Emerson
Begin a dialectical journal (DUE TOMORROW)
1st Entry: Emerson’s biography—pick three facts about Emerson, and explain how they will help you understand Emerson’s writing
Read and annotate both “Nature” and “Self- Reliance”
Aphorism: a terse saying embodying a general truth, or astute observationPick twos aphorisms from each essay that you’d like to bring into discussion tomorrow. Put these four aphorisms in a dialectical journal—may be hand-written or W/P
What does this aphorism mean to you?
What makes this idea “transcendental”?
How might this “advice” be relevant today?

7. Close Reading
Defining an author’s purpose, and identifying and analyzing the techniques and strategies employed to achieve that purpose.

8. 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.”

9. Rhetoric—Whose idea was it?
Socrates: B.C.E.
Father of Western philosophy and Mentor to Plato. Epistemology and logic.
Plato: B.C.E.
Student of Socrates and founder of “The Academy” Philosophy, logic, ethics, rhetoric and mathematics.
Aristotle: B.C.E.
Student of Plato, and teacher to Alexander the Great.