Week-end Update

FRIDAY IN CLASS
1. Renaissance Intro Quiz
If you missed it, you know it. Make it up ASAP.

2.  Something from the newspaper . . . I frequently regret that I generally don't read a given day's paper until AFTER school. From Friday's Newsline column in the Seattle Times (A2 News), "Today in History" section:
1587:  Mary, Queen of Scots was beheaded at Fotheringhay Castle in England after she was implicated in a plot to murder her cousin, Queen Elizabeth I.
See, the Seattle Times is on top of our subject matter!

3.  We reviewed a smattering of somethings ("morn in russet clad," the Julius Caesar disturbances in nature--> disturbances in humankind) left over from the end of scene 1)

4. Several students performed a round-robin reading of the speech given by King Claudius to all the people assembled at the formal court scene.  W just "read" it today; on Monday you/we will "deconstruct" it pretty carefully.

FOR MONDAY
Much of your success in reading Hamlet relies on your being willing to do what is asked of you, even on days that there is no direct accountability (that means written homework or a test!).  A teacher can tell you "What" to learn, or help explain how a process works, but reading Shakespeare is a skill that you must develop.  The teacher's job is to provide some smaller steps (scaffolding), and to provide a context for practice, but YOU and only you can do the work.  As I explained in class, some of the assessments will give you nothing but a passage with perhaps some reasonable notes on unexpected meanings, but you will have to figure it out.  Just approaching this with "I can't" does no good, and it will not help you learn and grow.

SO.  This week-end, your only obligation is to gain some familiarity with the court scene that we began in class.  It is NOT all of Act 1, Scene 2--you need to read the section where everyone is gathered in court.  You can stop at the point where Hamlet, Horatio, and Marcellus gather (as promised in scene 1) to watch and see if the Ghost will reappear. Your job is just to read this and try to have a handle on what happens.

In class I told you and showed you the exact line number and page number where this happens, but I did not bring home your various versions of the play this week-end. (Line numbers are the same for everyone who has the Folgers, whether tan or blue, but the 5th period edition has line numbers that vary somewhat.  And the later in the scene we go, the farther off they are from Folgers.)