Honors English 10 Mini Syllabus Haywood Early College / Hanson
Getting Started
As soon as you are able to:
1) Join our Google Classroom using your Haywood County Schools email. The code for the 10:00 class is: to63zv2
The code for the 12:50 class is: bigtz7o
2) Ensure you have both a parent and student account to Power School as this will allow you to check your official grades at any time.
Ms. Ballance (aballance@haywood.k12.nc.us) can help you with email and Power School issues should you need assistance.
Expectations
Our Google Meet classes will start promptly at 10:00 and 12:50, respectively. The meet info is located on our Google Classroom page, but if you have trouble getting to that, here they are in long-form:
10:00 https://meet.google.com/lookup/ggzjokzmcm
12:50 https://meet.google.com/lookup/euvckx3v7v
Plan on having your camera on at all times, but toggle your microphone on when you want to speak and leave it off at other times. I recommend turning captions on as this can be helpful if the audio is dodgy.
Course Info
We will be focused on improving your critical writing skills, broken into three main areas:
1) As an on-demand and remedial goal, we need to clean up any lingering grammar and punctuation issues – think commas and capitalization.
2) Our main writing goal is to be able to tailor the use of a variety of credible types of evidence to effectively engage the audience to achieve the desired purpose of the writing.
3) Our advanced writing goal is to write memorably with style using elements like parallel structure, sentence variety, and careful word-choice.
In the first nine-weeks, we will be focusing on reading and discussing shorter non-fiction pieces and writing smaller pieces in response to those that will culminate in a paper where you will be asked to tackle an issue that is timely for Americans in the summer and autumn of 2020. You’ll have considerable flexibility in what this means and how you approach it, but you’ll be evaluated on your ability to accomplish the three goals in the paragraph above.
You’ll notice the first piece of the semester, “Letter from Birmingham Jail” by Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., is already in the materials section of Google classroom. We’ll start by dissecting the piece thoroughly, looking at King’s audience, purpose, organization, choice of evidence, and dominant stylistic elements.
In the second nine-weeks, we’ll shift to literary analysis. The particular pieces are as yet unpicked, as students will have a considerable say in what makes it on the reading list. Again, we’ll read a number of pieces, writing shorter essays, but building to a longer paper that falls toward the end of the grading period.
Contacts
It would be incredibly helpful, if at least one parent or guardian could drop me an email at dhanson@haywood.k12.nc.us and leave me your preferred contact information – email, phone, whatever, along with a best time to contact if that’s helpful. Always feel free to drop me a note to my email if you have any questions or concerns.