Preparing for the Final

The final quiz will feature only objective questions (that is, there are no short answer questions at all). There will be ten multiple-choice questions, and 15 matching items. On the matching questions, you are provided with 16 names which you have to match to 15 statements--one name will not be used at all, and no name is used more than once.

The questions are all generated from the texts we have been studying since the last quiz. Those texts are:

• "Trifles" by Susan Glaspell
  
• "The Yellow Wallpaper" by Charlotte Perkins Gilman
  
• "Hills Like White Elephants" by Ernest Hemingway
  
• "Lamb to the Slaughter" by Roald Dahl
  
• "A Woman on a Roof" by Doris Lessing
  
• "First Shag in Ages" by Irvine Welsh
  
• Five Readers Theater Scripts by Aaron Shepherd:
  
  • "The Magic of Mushkil Gusha"
    
  • "Peddler Polly and the Story Stealer"
    
  • "The Legend of Slappy Hooper"
    
  • "The Millionaire Miser"
    
  • "Master Maid"
    

Be sure to know the basic series of events, as well as the names of characters and authors in each. Also, be certain that you know the literary terms we've used in our study of fiction:

• focalized and focalizing characters
  
• author, implied author, and narrator
  
• tone
  
• irony (situationa, dramatic, verbal)

Good luck, and email me if you have questions! You've all been great students, and I've enjoyed our class immensely.

Quiz #3 Approaches ...

The third quiz will be given on Wednesday, April 21. It will take the following form:

• 7 multiple-choice questions
  
• 2 short-answer questions

I gave specifics during class today on the form of the short answer questions; ask a classmate for details. The texts/materials that are covered on the quiz are:

• The Yellow Boat
  
• Readers Theater (information about that textual form from class notes, not the actual scripts for RT that you're performing)
  
• the poetry we've been studying recently, including Creech's Love That Dog

Good luck studying!

Class Cancelled 4/5/04

Class has been cancelled for Monday, April 5, 2004. My apologies--family illness issues force the cancellation of classes. We'll do the children's novel work on Wednesday.

Details about Quiz #2

Here's the scoop on the second quiz for Spring Semester, 2004. Sorry for the delay in posting this, but blame it on my internet provider at home (digitalpath.net)--no service for two days. Anyway, here's what will be covered by the quiz:

• The "getting ready to read Shakespeare" pieces in the course packet
  
• Lois Burdett's version of A Midsummer Night's Dream
  
• Shakespeare's play itself
  
• Any aspect of the play and its construction covered during class

The quiz itself will have a number of tasks for you to complete:

• 10 multiple-choice questions
  
• 8 matching "Who said it?" questions, where you match a quote from the play to its speaker
  
• 1 short answer question that asks you to tell me about the speaker, meaning, and context of a longer quotation from the play

Good luck with studying for the quiz!

Curious about Quiz #1???

The quiz, which we'll take in class on Monday, Feb. 23, will cover the following texts:

• Classic Fairy Tales (including Cinderella, Bluebeard, and Hansel and Gretel variants)
  
• Course Packet materials by Foster and Block
  
• Mosaic of Thought
  
• Briar Rose

The quiz itself is worth 25 points. There will be 10 multiple-choice questions on the readings; 7 matching questions that ask you to match a quotation from Briar Rose to the character who said that quote; and 2 short-answer questions. You should be sure to refresh your memory of the reading strategies from Mosaic of Thought, think about the 4 Rs of literary study, and know the variants of the fairy tales we've read. Good luck!

So, What's on the Final Quiz?

Our final quiz of the semester will follow the Readers Theater presentation of the script, "Master Maid," on Wednesday at 2 pm. The following texts will be covered on the quiz:

• Fairy tale variants: Bluebeard, Hansel & Gretel
  
• Readers Theater Scripts: Mushkil Gusha, Millionaire Miser, Peddler Polly, How Violence is Ended, Master Maid
  
• Novel: Jane Yolen's Briar Rose

Structure of the Quiz: It's all objective (no short answer/essay)!

• Multiple Choice: 10 questions on the Fairy Tales and RT Scripts
  
• Matching Quotations: 5 quotes from Briar Rose. You match the quote to the character who said it.
  
• Matching Character Descriptions: You match the 5 descriptive sentences to the characters from Briar Rose being described.

Note: On the matching questions, you should know that you have 6 choices for 5 questions--so one of the choices in each case will not be used at all.

From the above info, you should be able to tell that recalling elements from the various tales, and identifying characters from Briar Rose by name, is important! Good luck!

Quiz #3 is on Friday, Nov. 7!

To prepare for this quiz, revisit the terms associated with:

• drama
  
• readers theater
  
• fairy tales

You'll also want to be sure you know what happens in the various incarnations of the following fairy tales from our textbook:

• Little Red Riding Hood
  
• Beauty and the Beast
  
• Cinderella

Think as well about the fairy tales on a more qualitative level: which variants have you liked most so far? Which least? Why?

A Note for Friday/Saturday 101 Students

This weekend, we'll be spending time with a number of short texts--mostly fiction, with a brief play thrown in--and you might want to get a jump on reading some or all of them. These are the titles and locations ("CP" means they're in the course packet, while "WWW" means they can be found here).

• The Yellow Wall Paper (CP or www)
  
• A Woman on a Roof (www)
  
• First Shag in Ages (CP)
  
• Who Am I This Time? (CP)
  
• Trifles (CP)

You might also want to take a look at the multigenre papers in the course packet as a precursor to the weekend's big writing assignment.

See you on Friday!

For students in the 1pm class: we're back on track as far as the syllabus goes, so the readings for Wednesday will be what's listed on the schedule:

• Susan Glaspell's play, Trifles
  
• Winnifred Braun's article, A Teacher Talks to Parents

Both of these readings are in the course packet.

Okay, Friday-Saturday class members ... Our focus this coming weekend (Oct. 10-11) will be on poetry. Please visit the section of the website with online versions of the texts and read/print the poems in the poetry section (ballads, William Carlos Williams' poems, unusual poetic forms, Sylvia Plath's poems, the ee cummings poem, and the two Margaret Atwood poems). If you were able to secure a copy of Edric Mesmer's book "The Best Poems Ever" at the bookstore (it's small, and only costs $2.99), bring it with you as well.

We'll hold class at the usual time on Friday, from 4-8. The A.S. is holding a poetry slam that starts at 7 in the BMU's Wildcat Den (wherever that is!), and we'll go to that and experience some live, in-our-faces poetry. Should be a kick.

Remember that your letters about how you read should be brought in. We'll do another round of peer editing on them, so you might want to bring these in both hard copy and electronic forms.

Interested in the quiz on poetry??? Here's the scoop. The quiz will consist of:

• 5 multiple-guess questions.
  
• Two short answer questions.

The questions will deal with technical aspects of poetry that we've talked about (things like poetic forms--ballads, cinquains, villanelles, sestinas, sonnets, concrete poems, and so on), as well as specific poems we've read either online or in the Best Poems book. Sometimes, the questions will combine these two into one (e.g. I might ask you whether the Shakespeare poem we read was a ballad, or a sonnet, or a concrete poem). You can count on the fact that the quiz will ask you about Kenneth Koch's ideas about effective methods of teaching poetry to children, and that you'll have to wrestle with a brand-new poem during the quiz. Finally, you thought you had finished up with the whole Mosaic of Thought business, right? Well, you should always be prepared to talk about the reading strategies you use when you read something--and this quiz may just ask you to do that.

For those of you hardy individuals enrolled in the 101 Weekend class, I wanted to remind you to bring a few things to our next meeting.

• your copy of Mosaic of Thought
  
• the course packet
  
• a copy of your letter to parents (bring it on disk, too, if possible)
  
• a copy of your fairy tale readers theater adaptation (bring on disk, too)
  
• the children's novel you've been reading

Don't worry, we'll have plenty to do!

Interested in knowing about the quiz we'll have on Monday, Sept. 22? Here's the scoop!

The texts that will be covered are:

• Mosaic of Thought
  
• The Nanny Diaries
  
• The Yellow Wallpaper
  
• First Shag in Ages
  
• A Woman on a Roof
  
• Who Am I This Time?

The form of the quiz will include:

• 8 multiple-choice questions on the readings (worth 16 points)
  
• 2 short answer questions about the readings (worth 9 points)

The questions range from recalling facts from the texts to applying ideas to your own experiences as readers of the texts. To be prepared, you should know who the important characters are from the stories, what the important ideas are from Mosaic of Thought, and be able to describe the reading strategies you used when reading the short stories. Good luck! If you've done the reading, listened to and participated in class discussions, and kept up on the response work, you should do fine.

If you were in class today (Friday, 9/12), you already know this, but may have forgotten ...

The course packet is missing the story we're scheduled to read for Monday's class. That story is called "A Woman on a Roof" by Doris Lessing. So, instead of reading that story, we'll be moving right along to what the syllabus lists for Wednesday's class, "First Shag in Ages" by Irvine Welsh. Be sure to read the little prefatory note about that text before you read it, and don't be embarrassed to try reading the story aloud when you come to the parts with dialect. It's often easier to understand the conversation if you say it aloud.

Okay, so here's what's up with the final quiz.
Time/place details:

• Wednesday, 2 pm, Glenn 210 (MWF 1 pm class official exam slot)
  
• Wednesday, 3 pm, Glenn 210 (MWF 2 pm class optional time slot)
  
• Friday, noon, Taylor 204 (MWF 2 pm class official exam slot)

What's covered on the quiz:

• Fairy Tales: Cinderella, Bluebeard, Hansel & Gretel (and their variants; be familiar with their titles!)
  
• Novel: Briar Rose
  
• Literary Concepts: Intertextuality
  
• Readers Theater Presentations: The Magic of Mushkil Gusha, Peddler Polly and the Story Stealer, The Millionaire Miser, How Violence is Ended, and Master Maid

Quiz Format:

• 10 one-point Multiple Choice Questions on all areas covered above except Briar Rose
  
• 10 Matching Questions (5 matching descriptions to characters @ 1 pt. each; 5 matching characters to things they said @ 2 pts. each) on Briar Rose

Best of luck on the quiz! Email me @ pkittle@csuchico.edu if you have questions.

Remember, class today--Friday, March 28--will be held in the computer lab in Taylor Hall (that's room 205).

Announcements made due to class cancellations or other exigent circumstances will be made here.