Catcher in the rye chapter 6 audio

Chapter 6

We listened to a portion of chapter 6 in class and then we covered some allusions found in the chapter.

HOMEWORK:

-Read chapter 7

-Do chapter 6 Qs

Chapter Six:
Stradlater returned late that night, thanked Holden for the jacket and asked if he did the composition for him. When Stradlater reads it, he gets upset at Holden, for it is simply about a baseball glove. Since Stradlater is upset, Holden tears up the composition. Holden starts smoking, just to annoy Stradlater. Holden asks about the date, but Stradlater doesn't give very much information, only that they spent most of the time in Ed Banky's car. Finally he asks if Stradlater "gave her the time" there. Stradlater says that the answer is a "professional secret," and Holden responds by trying to punch Stradlater. Stradlater pushes him down and sits with his knees on Holden's chest. He only lets Holden go when he agrees to say nothing more about Stradlater's date. When he calls Stradlater a moron, he knocks Holden out. Holden then goes to the bathroom to wash the blood off his face. Even though he claims to be a pacifist, Holden enjoys the look of blood on his face.

Catcher in the rye chapter 5 audio

Chapter 5

We listened to chapter 5 today and talked about some allusions in the chapter.

In the second period we had a chapters 1-5 quiz.

HOMEWORK:

-Finish chapter 5 questions

-Write a journal about the day that Mr. Spencer had Holden over to his home.

Write as if Mr. Spencer is -YOU.

What advice did Mr. Spencer give Holden?? What did Holden think of this advice??

1/2-1 page

Chapter Five:
On Saturday nights at Pencey the students are served steak; Holden believes this occurs because parents visit on Sunday and students can thus tell them that they had steak for dinner the previous night, as if it were a common occurrence. Holden goes with Ackley and Mal Brossard into New York City to see a movie, but since Ackley and Brossard had both seen that particular Cary Grant comedy, they play pinball and get hamburgers instead. When they return, Ackley remains in Holden's room, telling about a girl he had sex with, but Holden knows that he is lying, for whenever he tells that same story, the details always change. Holden tells him to leave so that he can write Stradlater's composition. He writes about his brother Allie's baseball mitt. Allie, born two years after Holden, died of leukemia in 1946. The night that Allie died, Holden broke all of the windows in his garage with his fist.

Chapter 4

We listened to a part of chapter 4 today and then students had to remember what happened in the following scenes in the book with their partners.

HOMEWORK:

-Chapter 5 reading

-Vocab sheet

-Chapter 4 Qs

Chapter Four:
Since he has nothing else to do, Holden goes down to the bathroom to chat with Stradlater as he shaves. Stradlater, in comparison to Ackley, is a "secret" slob, who would always shave with a rusty razor that he would never clean. Stradlater is a "Yearbook" kind of handsome guy. He asks Holden to write a composition for him for English. Holden realizes the irony that he is flunking out of Pencey, yet is still asked to do work for others. Stradlater insists, however, that Holden not write it too well, for Hartzell knows that Holden is a hot-shot in English. On an impulse, Holden gives Stradlater a half nelson, which greatly annoys Stradlater. Stradlater talks about his date that night with Jane Gallagher. Although he cannot even get her name correct, Holden knows her well, for she lived next door to him several summers ago and they would play checkers together. Stradlater barely listens as he fixes his hair with Holden's gel. Holden asks Stradlater not to tell Jane that he got kicked out. He then borrows Holden's hound's-tooth jacket and leaves. Ackley returns, and Holden is actually glad to see him, for he takes his mind off of other matters.

STUDY FOR THE TEST OF CH. 1-5 and VOCABULARY FRIDAY

Catcher in the rye audio chapter 4

Catcher in the rye audio chapter 3

Catcher in the rye audio chapter 2

Catcher in the rye audio chapter 1

Chapter 3

We discussed chapter 3 today.

HOMEWORK:

-Read chapter 4

-Finish chapter questions

-Start on vocabulary sheet (due Friday)

Chapter Three:
Holden claims that he is the most terrific liar one could meet. He admits that he lied to Spencer by telling him that he had to go to the gym. At Pencey,Holden lives in the OssenburgerMemorial Wing of the new dorms. Ossenburger is a wealthy undertaker who graduated from the school; Holden tells how false Ossenburger seemed when he gave a speech exalting faith in Jesus and how another student farted during the ceremony. Holden returns to his room, where he puts on a red hunting hat they he bought in New York. Holden discusses the books that he likes to read: he prefers Ring Lardner, but is now reading Dinesen's Out of Africa. Ackley, a student whose room is connected to Holden's, barges in on Holden. Holden describes Ackley as having a terrible personality and an even worse complexion. Holden tries to ignore him, then pretends that he is blind to annoy Ackley. Ackley cuts his nails right in front of Holden, and asks about Ward Stradlater, Holden's roommate. Ackley claims that he hates Stradlater, that "goddamn sonuvabitch," but Holden tells Ackley that he hates Stradlater for the simple reason that Stradlater told him that he should actually brush his teeth. Holden defends Stradlater, claiming that he is conceited, but still generous. Stradlater arrives, and is friendly to Holden (in a phony sort of way), and asks to borrow a jacket from Holden. Stradlater walks around shirtless to show off his build.

Chapter 2

We talked about Chapter 2 and I gave you a handout sheet
with Chapters 1&2 allusions.


Summary: Chapter 2
“Life is a game, boy. Life is a game that one plays according to the rules.”

Holden greets Mr. Spencer and his wife in a manner that suggests he is close to them. He is put off by his
teacher’s rather decrepit condition but seems otherwise to respect him. In his sickroom, Spencer tries to lec-
ture Holden about his academic failures. He confirms Pencey’s headmaster’s assertion that “[l]ife is a game”
and tells Holden that he must learn to play by the rules. Although Spencer clearly feels affection for Holden,
he bluntly reminds the boy that he flunked him, and even forces him to listen to the terrible essay he handed in
about the ancient Egyptians. Finally, Spencer tries to convince Holden to think about his future. Not wanting
to be lectured, Holden interrupts Spencer and leaves, returning to his dorm room before dinner.

HOMEWORK:
-Finish Chapter 2 questions
-Read chapters 3-5 before next class
-Quiz on chapters 1-5 September 28th

Chapter 1

We had a quiz on J.D Salinger today.

We then talked about chapter 1

Summary: Chapter 1

Holden Caulfield writes his story from a rest home to which he has been sent for therapy. He refuses to talk
about his early life, mentioning only that his brother D. B. is a Hollywood writer. He hints that he is bitter
because D. B. has sold out to Hollywood, forsaking a career in serious literature for the wealth and fame of the
movies. He then begins to tell the story of his breakdown, beginning with his departure from Pencey Prep, a
famous school he attended in Agerstown, Pennsylvania.
Holden’s career at Pencey Prep has been marred by his refusal to apply himself, and after failing four of his
five subjects—he passed only English—he has been forbidden to return to the school after the fall term. The
Saturday before Christmas vacation begins, Holden stands on Thomsen Hill overlooking the football field,
where Pencey plays its annual grudge match against Saxon Hall. Holden has no interest in the game and
hadn’t planned to watch it at all. He is the manager of the school’s fencing team and is supposed to be in New
York for a meet, but he lost the team’s equipment on the subway, forcing everyone to return early.
Holden is full of contempt for the prep school, but he looks for a way to “say goodbye” to it. He fondly
remembers throwing a football with friends even after it grew dark outside. Holden walks away from the
game to go say goodbye to Mr. Spencer, a former history teacher who is very old and ill with the flu. He sprints
to Spencer’s house, but since he is a heavy smoker, he has to stop to catch his breath at the main gate. At the
door, Spencer’s wife greets Holden warmly, and he goes in to see his teacher.

HOMEWORK:
-Read chapter2
-Finish chapter 1 questions 1-10

Welcome back!

Great that you all did so well on the summer fables!

Wonderful fables thus far!!!!

We watched a power point slide show on J.D Salinger today.

Please read over the Biography of Salinger for next day.

HOMEWORK:

-Read chapter 1

-Read about Salinger

-Quiz on J.D next class!

About The Catcher In The Rye

The novel opens with the narrator, Holden Caulfield, a seventeen-year-old boy from New York City, telling the story of three days in his life. The whole narrative is a coming to terms with the past, since Holden tells it from a psychiatric institution.

It is the adult world that has driven him insane. He just cannot relate to anyone except for his kid sister Phoebe. Everything and all other people seem "phony" to him. Holden is unable to accept life. Since Holden is becoming an adult himself, he is unhappy with what he will represent. He flunks out of three boarding schools in a row, the latest of them Pencey Prep, which is also where the first part of the story takes place.

One Saturday night, after an unpleasant experience with his history teacher "Old Spencer," his roommate Stradlater and the boy next door, Robert Ackley, Holden decides to leave Pencey four days early for Christmas break. He knows that he cannot return to his parents because they are not aware that he has been expelled again. Holden spends the next three days wandering aimlessly around New York City. He stays at a cheap hotel for one night, goes to two night clubs, dances with older women, often talks and thinks about sex, even has a prostitute come up to his room.

The next day, he talks with some nuns about literature and has a date with his former girlfriend Sally Woodruff. They go to the theater and also go ice-skating. When he asks her to run away with him, she gets mad and they part. He is "depressed," at this time Holden thinks and even talks to his deceased brother Allie. To Holden, Allie represented innocence. With nobody else around, Holden turns to the only person he can relate to, his sister Phoebe. He sneaks into his parent's apartment at night to talk to his sister. He tells her about his dream to be a "catcher in the rye," and that he wants to run away.

He then leaves to meet his former teacher, Mr. Antolini. They have a good talk, but Holden leaves in a hurry when he thinks his host makes a sexual advance on him. He spends the night in a train station, then runs around town.

Finally, he meets his sister, who tells him she wants to run away with him and that she will never go back to school. Holden sees himself in her, finally changes his mind and decides to go back to his parents. We are able to conclude that Holden then is sent to a mental hospital for treatment.

Final Exams

I was able to check your Final exams!

Please pickup your tests in the Teacher's
room pickup box.

Everyone did pretty good!

Chapter 10

We played a study game in class.

Chapter 10 was later discussed in

your groups.

HOMEWORK:

-Complete The Animal Farm/

Russian Revolution events page

-Study for Friday's final exam

-Complete chapter 10 questions for Friday.

Try these sites to help you study

Matching game:

http://www.quia.com/servlets/quia.activities.common.ActivityPlayer?AP_rand=983491331&AP_activityType=14&AP_urlId=13229&AP_continuePlay=true&id=13229

Theme information:

http://www.novelguide.com/animalfarm/themeanalysis.html

Animal Farm movie and Chapter 9

We watched the ANIMAL FARM animation today.

In the second class we worked on chapter 9 in

groups. To end the class we had a Question &

Answer game.

HOMEWORK:

-Read chapter 10 for next class

-Do chapter 9 questions

-Work on the Russia Animal Farm

events sheet due on Thursday.

FINAL EXAM

ON THE

WHOLE BOOK
ON FRIDAY!!!

Chapters 7-8 Quiz

We had a quiz for chapters 7-8 today.

HOMEWORK:

-Read chapter 9 tonite

-Work on your Russian Revolution/

Animal Farm events sheet

The EVENTS SHEET is due

next week THURSDAY!

UPCOMING NEXT CLASS...........................

We will watch the ANIMAL FARM ANIMATION MOVIE
ON FRIDAY!

THEMES,MOTIFS, & SYMBOLS

Today we watched a slide show about:
Themes, motifs, and symbols of
ANIMAL FARM.

HOMEWORK:
-Do chapter 8 questions
-Study for quiz on Chapters 7-8
-NO READING TONITE!

Here is some of the stuff you should know:

THEMES

1. The Corruption of Socialist Ideals in the Soviet Union

• Retelling the story of the emergence and development of Soviet communism in the form of an animal fable, Animal Farm allegorizes the rise to power of the dictator Joseph Stalin.

• In novella, the overthrow of the human oppressor Mr. Jones by a democratic coalition of animals quickly gives way to the consolidation of power among the pigs.

• Much like the Soviet intelligentsia, the pigs establish themselves as the ruling class in the new society.

Snowball vs. Napoleon

•The struggle for a leadership position between Leon Trotsky and Stalin emerges in the rivalry between the pigs Snowball and Napoleon.

•In both the historical and fictional cases, the idealistic but politically less powerful figure (Trotsky and Snowball) is expelled from the revolutionary state by the malicious and violent overtaker of power (Stalin and Napoleon).

•The purges and show trials with which Stalin eliminated his enemies and solidified his political base find expression in Animal Farm as the false confessions and executions of animals whom Napoleon distrusts following the collapse of the windmill.

•Stalin’s tyrannical rule and eventual abandonment of the founding principles of the Russian Revolution are represented by the pigs’ turn to violent government and the adoption of human traits and behaviors, the trappings of their original oppressors.

FROM PIGS TO MEN

•The pigs have become more human day by day.

*By the end of the story, the pigs are walking upright on their hind legs, drinking alcohol, and carrying whips.

•Napoleon entertains his human neighbors and it is impossible to tell the pigs from the men.


WHAT ORWELL THOUGHT

•Although Orwell believed strongly in socialist ideals, he felt that the Soviet Union realized these ideals in a terribly perverse form.

•His novella creates its most powerful ironies in the moments in which Orwell depicts the corruption of Animalist ideals by those in power.

•For Animal Farm serves not so much to condemn tyranny the use of absolute power as to indict the horrifying hypocrisy of tyrannies that base themselves on, and owe their initial power to, ideologies of liberation and equality.

•The gradual changing and perversion of the Seven Commandments illustrates this hypocrisy with vivid force, as do Squealer’s elaborate philosophical justifications for the pigs’ blatantly unprincipled actions.

•Thus, the novella critiques the violence of the Stalinist regime against the human beings it ruled, and also points to Soviet communism’s violence against human logic, language, and ideals.

2. The Societal Tendency Toward Class Levels

•Animal Farm offers commentary on the development of class tyranny and the human tendency to maintain and reestablish class structures even in societies that allegedly stand for total equality.

•The novella illustrates how classes that are initially unified in the face of a common enemy, as the animals are against the humans, may become internally divided when that enemy is eliminated.

•The expulsion of Mr. Jones creates a power vacuum, and it is only so long before the next oppressor assumes totalitarian control. The natural division between intellectual and physical labor quickly comes to express itself as a new set of class divisions, with the “brainworkers” (as the pigs claim to be) using their superior intelligence to manipulate society to their own benefit.


3. The Danger of a Naïve Working Class

•One of the novella’s most impressive accomplishments is its portrayal not just of the figures in power but also of the oppressed people themselves.

•Animal Farm is not told from the perspective of any particular character, though occasionally it does slip into Clover’s consciousness. Rather, the story is told from the perspective of the common animals as a whole.

•Gullible, loyal, and hardworking, these animals give Orwell a chance to sketch how situations of oppression arise not only from the motives and tactics of the oppressors but also from the naïveté of the oppressed, who are not necessarily in a position to be better educated or informed.

•When presented with a dilemma, Boxer prefers not to puzzle out the implications of various possible actions but instead to repeat to himself, “Napoleon is always right.” Animal Farm demonstrates how the inability or unwillingness to question authority condemns the working class to suffer the full extent of the ruling class’s oppression.

4. The Abuse of Language as Instrumental to the Abuse of Power

•One of Orwell’s central concerns, in Animal Farm, is the way in which language can be manipulated as an instrument of control.

•In Animal Farm, the pigs gradually twist and distort rhetoric of socialist revolution to justify their behavior and to keep the other animals in the dark.

•The animals heartily embrace Major’s visionary ideal of socialism, but after Major dies, the pigs gradually twist the meaning of his words.

•As a result, the other animals seem unable to oppose the pigs without also opposing the ideals of the Rebellion.

•By the end of the novella, after Squealer’s repeated reconfigurations of the Seven Commandments in order to decriminalize the pigs’ treacheries, the main principle of the farm can be openly stated as “all animals are equal, but some animals are more equal than others.”

•This outrageous abuse of the word “equal” and of the ideal of equality in general typifies the pigs’ method, which becomes increasingly audacious as the novel progresses.

•Orwell’s sophisticated exposure of this abuse of language remains one of the most compelling and enduring features of Animal Farm, worthy of close study even after we have decoded its allegorical characters and events.

MOTIFS

Songs

•Animal Farm is filled with songs, poems, and slogans, including Major’s stirring “Beasts of England,” Minimus’s ode to Napoleon, the sheep’s chants, and Minimus’s revised anthem, “Animal Farm, Animal Farm.”

•All of these songs serve as propaganda, one of the major conduits of social control.

•By making the working-class animals speak the same words at the same time, the pigs evoke an atmosphere of grandeur and nobility associated with the recited text’s subject matter.

•The songs also erode the animals’ sense of individuality and keep them focused on the tasks by which they will purportedly achieve freedom.

State Ritual

•As Animal Farm shifts gears from its early revolutionary fervor to a phase of consolidation of power in the hands of the few, national rituals become an ever more common part of the farm’s social life.

•Military awards, large parades, and new songs all increase as the state attempts to reinforce the loyalty of the animals.

•The increasing frequency of the rituals bespeaks the extent to which the working class in the novella becomes ever more reliant on the ruling class to define their group identity and values.

SYMBOLS

Animal Farm

•Animal Farm, known at the beginning and the end of the novel as the Manor Farm, symbolizes Russia and the Soviet Union under Communist Party rule.

•But more generally, Animal Farm stands for any human society be it capitalist, socialist, fascist, or communist.

•It possesses the internal structure of a nation, with a government (the pigs), a police force or army (the dogs), a working class (the other animals), and state holidays and rituals. Its location amid a number of hostile neighboring farms supports its symbolism as a political entity with diplomatic concerns.

The Barn

•The barn at Animal Farm, on whose outside walls the pigs paint the Seven Commandments and, later, their revisions, represents the collective memory of a modern nation.

•The many scenes in which the ruling-class pigs alter the principles of Animalism and in which the working-class animals puzzle over but accept these changes represent the way an institution in power can revise a community’s concept of history to bolster its control.

•If the working class believes history to lie on the side of their oppressors, they are less likely to question oppressive practices. Moreover, the oppressors, by revising their nation’s conception of its origins and development, gain control of the nation’s very identity, and the oppressed soon come to depend upon the authorities for their communal sense of self.

The Windmill

•The great windmill symbolizes the pigs’ manipulation of the other animals for their own gain.

•Despite the immediacy of the need for food and warmth, the pigs exploit Boxer and the other common animals by making them undertake backbreaking labor to build the windmill, which will ultimately earn the pigs more money and thus increase their power.

•The pigs’ declaration that Snowball is responsible for the windmill’s first collapse constitutes psychological manipulation, as it prevents the common animals from doubting the pigs’ abilities and unites them against a supposed enemy.

•The ultimate conversion of the windmill to commercial use is one more sign of the pigs’ betrayal of their fellow animals.
•
From an allegorical point of view, the windmill represents the enormous modernization projects undertaken in Soviet Russia after the Russian Revolution.

Chapter 7

Today I returned your chapters 5-6

quiz. Some of you did great. A few

of you could use a little more study

time for the next one.

We talked about the top 3 events of

chapter 7 in pairs today.

HOMEWORK:

-Read chapter 8 for next class Wednesday

-Finish chapter 7 the 10 questions

QUIZ THURSDAY CHAPTERS 7-8