Wednesday, December 16, 2009

Grammar Review for Finals

Subject Verb Agreement:
You can review the rules of SVA here.

Here's the Blue Book of Grammar quiz on SVA.

You can also do interactive exercises on ChompChomp.com.
Exercise 1
http://chompchomp.com/hotpotatoes/sva02.htm

Pronoun Antecedent Agreement:

You can review the rules in a simplified manner on the OWL site.

You can also do some of the interactive quizzes on the ChompChomp.com site. Any of them will be helpful.
Exercise 1
Exercise 2
Exercise 3

Quotation Marks:

The Blue Book of Grammar has an excellent list of the rules.

Then, you can test your knowledge by taking a quiz on quotation marks.

Another quiz on quotation marks. This one is from the OWL at Purdue. They always have great stuff.

Thursday, December 3, 2009

Night - Part 6 (pages 81-109)

Part 6 – The Importance of Memory (pages 81-109)

Central Question by emphasizing identity, memory, and the importance of witnessing.

Consider how prisoners struggle to maintain their identity under extraordinary conditions:

• After the forced march, the prisoners are crammed into a barracks. That night Juliek plays a fragment of a Beethoven concerto on the violin he has managed to keep the entire time he was at Auschwitz.
What do you think prompts Juliek to play that evening? What does the music mean to Eliezer? To the other prisoners who hear the sounds? To Juliek?

• In this section of the book, Eliezer tells of three fathers and three sons. He speaks of Rabbi Eliahou and his son, of the father whose son killed him for a piece of bread, and finally of his own father and himself. What words does Eliezer use to describe his response to each of the first two stories? How do these stories affect the way he reacts to his father’s illness? To his father’s death?

• What does Eliezer mean when he writes that he feels free after his father’s death? Is he free of responsibility? Or is he free to go under, to drift into death?

• Eliezer later states, “Since my father’s death, nothing mattered to me anymore.” What does he mean by these words? What do they suggest about his struggle to maintain his identity? Think about what it means to describe one’s image as a “corpse contemplating me.”

• In the next to the last sentence in the book, Eliezer says that when he
looks in a mirror after liberation, he sees a corpse contemplating him. He ends the book by stating, “The look in his eyes as he gazed at me has never left me.” What does that sentence mean?

• Why is it important to Eliezer to remember? To tell you his story?

• How has he tried to keep you from responding to his story the way he and his father once responded to the one told by Moshe the Beadle? How successful has he been? Discuss why Wiesel titled his autobiographical story “Night.”

Consider the bigger picture – Looking at the story as a whole

 Night focuses on a single year in Eliezer’s life. Identify some of the internal and external conflicts he faced that year.

 Compare and contrast your earlier pictures of Eliezer with the way he describes himself at the end of the book. How do your pictures and descriptions help you understand the changes he refers to?

 How did the relationship between Eliezer and his father change in the course of the year on which the book focuses? How do you account for that change?

 What is the metaphorical meaning of the title, Night?


 Why do you think Wiesel tells his story from the first person perspective? If Night were written in the third person, would it be more or less believable? Why do you think Elie Wiesel begins Night with the story of Moshe the Beadle? What lessons does the narrator seem to learn from Moshe’s experiences in telling his own story?

 Write your responses to this book. You might also list questions and comments.

Night - Part 5

Part 5 – Faith and Survival at Auschwitz (pages 63-80)

Consider the kapos and the young pipel who are hanged. Why might this be such a big deal even though thousands of others have already been killed? Whoa re they bystanders? Who are the victims in the novel?

Consider how Eliezer struggles with his faith.

• Why does Eliezer direct his anger toward God rather than the Germans? What does his anger suggest about the depths of his faith?

• At the beginning of Night, Eliezer describes himself as someone who believes “profoundly.” How have his experiences at Auschwitz affected that faith?

• Describe the encounter between father and son after the services. Why does Eliezer say that the two of them “had never understood one another so clearly”? Why does Eliezer describe himself as “afraid” of having to wish his father a happy New Year?

• How does Eliezer respond when he fears his father has been “selected”? When he discovers that he has indeed been “selected”? When he learns his father has avoided the “final selection”? Why did his father give him the spoon and the knife as his inheritance? What is the significance of such a gift in Auschwitz?

• How has the relationship between Eliezer and his father changed during their time at Auschwitz? What has each come to represent to the other? Consider how Eliezer and his father make a decision that will decide their fate.

• What choices are open to Eliezer and his father when the camp is evacuated? How is the decision to leave made? Who makes the choice? Is it the “right” choice? Or is it an example of a “choiceless choice”? How does the decision help us understand why many survivors attribute their survival to luck?

• Write your responses to this section of the book. You might also list questions and comments on this part of the book.

• Night is written in short, simple sentences. Critics call this kind of writing “controlled.” That means that every word has been carefully chosen for a precise meaning. How do you explain the decision to
write in a “controlled” or measured way to describe experiences that are beyond control?