Red Space Rocket

Hello, Year 10 students.

First of all, after my three weeks away from our classes at the end of last term, it is nice to be back to working with you. I am sorry to have missed most of the trials based on Runner, but I have read your essays and, for the most part, they are very good.
Now we are moving on to fresh material. This week, we started on a story called An Arrangement in Black and White, which was written by the American write Dorothy Parker in the 1920, a time when America was deeply divided by race.
Here is a summary of what happened, from the website of the New Yorker, where this story was published in 1927.

Woman asks host to present her to Walter Williams, negro singer saying, “I don’t see why on earth it isn’t perfectly all right to meet colored people. I haven’t any feeling at all about it”. She has a colored laundress whom she thinks of as a friend. She would like Walter Williams to come to her house to sing, but she couldn’t ask him because of Burton- but she wouldn’t have any feeling in the matter. Wants to know if she should shake hands with him. Then she is introduced She is very condescending in her remarks, but tells him How well he does, she’s enjoyed his singing so much, where does he get his songs, etc

As you know, we have read this story twice, and are now going through it looking for examples of three ideas that relate to racism. We came up with three things that make behaviour racist.

• The first is treating people badly.
• The second is regarding people as being inferior.
• And the third is believing that every one of the same race is the same in all respect, or stereotyping by race.

Once we have evidence that relates to these three ideas, we will plan and write an essay that answers the following question: Is the woman in An Arrangement in Black and White being racist in this story?

Once we have finished this response, which should be late in the week, we will start work on our film text, a 2010 film called The Help.

Hello all,

We have student-lead conferences on Thursday and Friday. I am aware that me being away on the other campus makes things complicated by I would like people in my mentor groups to still make time with me for a student-led conference. The available times are 10am to 7pm on Thursday 29tt, and 9am to 12pm on Friday 30th. Please send me a message, either on the WebMessages system at school or via this link. Please tell me what time you would like, and I’ll book you in and send you a reply.

Although a lot of my time will be spend with my mentor students and their parents, I would like to see the students who I have for Year 10 and Year 11 English, too. Please send me a message with the 10-minute block that you would like, and I’ll book you in. You will need to come across to the Year 7 building at the Vines Road Campus. Sorry about that, but I need to be in two places at once and this is how I can achieve that.

Cover of Runner

Hello all,

I am sorry that I didn’t get to tell most of you this in person, but something has come up. I will be working at the Vines Road campus for the next three weeks, and Miss Jones will be your teacher in my place.

You are all heading for serious tasks: the closed-book Maestro task, and the trial of Charlie Feehan and an essay in response to Runner. Please work as well for Miss Jones as you did for me, perhaps even better.

This is a new unit of work, and I am sorry that I am not here to start it with you. We will come back to our work on the Runner trial next week.

Working either alone or in pairs, you are to research a topic for a very short persuasive talk that the will do as part of the try outs for the English Plain Speaking Competition.
Using the computers to research, you should create a very basic PowerPoint pack with the following slides.

• Slide 1: The topic chosen
• Slide 2: The first main point that they want the audience to understand about this topic
• Slide 3: a statistic or fact to support this first point
• Slide 4: the second main point that they want the audience to understand about this topic
• Slide 5: a brief story that supports this second point
• Slide 6: A striking image that relates to this topic.

All of this should be completed in the 100 minutes. Work, completed or not, should be dropped in my OMEAM dropbox on the W drive.

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Hello all,

I have another commitment today, and you will have to work under your steam today in Room Q03. Please stay until the end of the double session and work steadily.

I have left two key resources in the room for you: Part C of the almanac, and the completed Maestro index. If you want electronic copies of these documents, you can find them on W:\Resources\OMEAM\Year 11 English\Maestro

Using these resources, I want you to type up and complete plan and introductory paragraph for the following prompt.

What did Paul learn from his maestro, and how did it affect him?

Before you write your response, please read the feedback based on your last pieces, here in Red Space Rocket.

Once you have completed this work, please copy the text into this form and email it to me.

Hello Year 11s,

I have just read the introductions that one class wrote today, and I wanted to share some feedback that I thought would be useful to most of you.

1. Talk about concepts in the introduction, rather than detailed examples. Aside from the opening quotation, you should mainly stick to talking about they key ideas in the introduction. You might want to mention key characters and incidents, but save further detail for your body paragraphs.

2. Avoid writing “I” sentences.

I think that Maestro is about loss, guilt, but also greatness and talent. (avoid)

Maestro is about loss and guilt, but also greatness and talent (much better)

Here is what the stronger responses looked like.

“Eduard [Keller] would have none of it. He had played for Hitler…so who could harm is wife and family.” However, Keller was mistaken and the Nazi regime did harm his family, who died in a concentration camp. His loss was not enough punishment, and Herr Keller’s guilt drove him to continue punishing himself. Peter Goldsworthy’s novel Maestro, told from the point of view of a young piano students is a story of guilt and loss, but it is also a about greatness and talent, and the gulf between the two. Guilt is a major feature of Keller’s life after the war, as he punishes himself for his mistakes, both things that he did and things that we failed to do. Paul Crabbe, his student, also has opportunities to see guilt over his decisions. Loss is another major theme, although we see this played out more in the life of Eduard Keller than his student. Keller keenly feels the loss of his pre-war life, as he had so much and feel like the important things are gone. Finally, Goldsworthy demonstrated to the reader the truth of the gap between talent and greatness, this time through the life and ambitions of Paul Crabbe. Talent is being practised and proficient at something, but greatness is something else, something much harder to define and achieve. Far from being a simple story of a students and his teacher, Maestro is a complex and multi-layered text, built on a foundation of guilt.

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Hello Year 10s,

We have a busy week ahead of us. It is already the sixth week of term and, ideally, I’d like us to take Charlie Feehan to trial in Week 8 at the absolute latest.

This week we’ll work together doing a table reading of key chapters together. Then you’ll break into your teams and a build your case. As a minimum, I’ll get each group to write down the following information.

• The key point that you are trying to make
• The pages where the key evidence is
• Five questions that you would ask one or more witnesses. Remember, you are telling a story with your questions, so they need to be very carefully constructed.

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Hello Year 11s,

By now, you should have all finished reading Maestro, and some of you will be finished it for a second time, which is certainly ideal if you can manage it.

If you have not finished the novel yet, I will read with a small group to help you through to the end.

The first thing that the majority of the class will do is complete the index of notable events and quotations that we started on last week. Just like last week, we’ll divide into pairs and tackle a few pages each.

Once the index is finished, I’ll give you each a copy and post it here, too.

After that, we’ll start on some extended responses, in the form of five-paragraph, expository essays. I’ll be handing out copies of Section C of the English Students’ Almanac, and we will work though this structure as we work through the key concepts and themes in this text.

I’ll post a list of prompts here tomorrow. Some of these will be from old exams and others from various other sources, including study guides.

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Monday marks the start of week six, Year 11s, and you will do the formal assessment task about Maestro at the start of week eight. Although we have gained a good understanding from our work together, you must complete the novel on your own by Monday 5th March.

During weeks six and seven, we will be looking at particular questions that relate to this novel. These are questions that I have taken from previous VCE exams and study guides.

We will also complete the index of the novel that we started work on this week.

Image by Getty Images via @daylife

To be up to date, you should be up to page 65 by the time I see you this week.

In order to do as well as possible for the assessment task, we need to step up our pace a little. To manage this, I’ll be giving you some reading time in class this week. The room is easily big enough that some people can read with me, if they like, while everyone else reads silently.

In our single session, the last class each week, I’ll give you forty minutes to write a red-book response to this prompt: How is music used to add to meaning in Maestro?

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Now that we have out roles sorted out, we will try to make some substantial progress through Runner this week.

Last week, it seemed to work well when most of you read under your own steam and some people read with me, so we’ll give that another go.

To give us more reading time, we’ll only do one red-book writing piece this morning: Squizzy is a good to Charlie.

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Yesterday and today we listened to music from the following composers and wrote a short, six to eight line, desription of each, including information about tempo, mood, type of instruments and purpose.

• Bach
• Liszt
• Wagner
• Gilbert and Sullivan
• Leiber and Stoller

I have given you some reading time in class, but each of you needs to be up to page 50 of the text by the time I see you next.

The question to keep in mind is this: which of our first impressions about Eduard Keller at proving to be wrong?

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This coming week, we will continue to work our way through Goldworthy’s novel and writing extended responses.

The topics for the extended responses are -

• How were our first impressions about Keller wrong?
• How is music used to add to meaning in Maestro?

We will still read key scenes together, but – to cover the material in time – I will be setting you half a dozen pages at a time to read on your own. Once you’ve read these bits, we’ll pull apart the important bits that you discovered.

On the topic of extended responses, that vast majority of you are coming along in leaps and bounds with these pieces. I have just read twenty or so responses and there is a lot of very impressive writing and understanding. I’ve written more comments for everyone, including suggestions for how you can get your responses to the next level of quality.

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This week, we will be progressing chapter-by-chapter through runner. Each team, the prosecution and the defence, will read a chapter and then record the following information in their team journals.

• Key incidents (including page reference)
• What does this chapter show about Charlie that is useful to our case?
• What are three specific questions for witnesses.

This last point, they specific questions, is where you will really benefit from working together as a team. Remember, there are many ways to get a witness to say what you want. You don’t always have to attack them. Also remember this, the jury needs you to construct them a story, so make sure that your questions build up the story that you want to tell.

In addition to this group work for the trial, you will be writing in your red books in response to prompts for specific chapters.

• Chapter Three: When you take more than you should, you are a thief
• Chapter Five: Nostrils is a good friend
• Chapter Six: Squizzy is a good man

In each case, your response should be drawing examples from Runner, up and including that chapter. I would expect most responses will be about a page long, and expressed in valid, flowing, formal English.

Read pages 11 through to 18 and write detailed, supported answers to these questions.

What does Paul’s mother mean when she says, “You know so much for your age. And so little.”?

Do Paul’s parents agree on most things, and do they have a happy marriage?

Paul says that after Darwin “there was only one further escape.” What does he mean, and which character is he referring to?

What does Paul suspect that Herr Keller might really is? Is this an unreasonable suspicion?