At least five forms of pseudoscience…

Plans for the AP exam.  Thanks to everyone for their spirited arguments about the upcoming AP exam/Final.  Here’s my final decision. Everyone will take some sort of final. If you’re taking the official final, you won’t be required to take a final from me and your grade will be the result of the other assignments we’ve had, including two more in-class AP prompts.  There will be no adjustment of grades for scores on the AP exam. If you want to take an exam from me in order to raise your grade, you can negotiate that with me. If you are not taking the official AP exam, our final will be May 20th and 22nd, will include the full compliment of the AP exam, will be graded more or less at the level of the AP exam and will be over before Memorial Day.  This seems to me to be the fairest method in balancing competing interests while fulfilling my need to evaluate you in your abilities and skills.

OK, let’s see your paragraphs from Quotidiana and teach us something.

Satire: An AP prompt used the following article from The Onion for an AP rhetorical strategies prompt. After some group consultation, we’ll talk about how to respond to this and what makes satire work.

In class, in pairs, write your own Onion headline and at least 3-4 paragraphs of the fake news piece that would accompany it. Some possible topics include:

• WASL
• Graduation
• Bad TV
• Pretentious Teachers/Artists
• Grades
• The Election
• Seattle

We may listen to this in preparation.

HW: Read A Modest Proposal by Jonathan Swift. In a 300 word blog post: What’s the purpose of this piece? How does the satire serve a rhetorical purpose or put forth an indirect claim? Please excerpt 3 sections and comment more directly on them.

Image Credit: The Onion