Wednesday, September 18, 2019

Happy Homecoming

After establishing your ethos, make an emotional plea to either keep celebrating homecoming the way it is currently at Elk County Catholic High School or to change the way we celebrate homecoming at Elk County Catholic High School. You should include in your argument all facets of the celebration including the weeks leading up to the event as well as the celebration at the football game and the dance. I will remind you, do NOT be a sophist. This is not designed to be a place to voice complaints, rather, it is a place to constructively discuss this high school's approach to homecoming weekend. If you have ideas that you think would make it better, share them. If you have an argument that warrants not having a homecoming, we will listen to that argument as well. But be respectful, or your post will be removed. And have fun with it!



Friday, February 8, 2019

Question #3

In his 1998 book Life the Movie: How Entertainment Conquered Reality, Neal Gabler wrote the following. One does not necessarily have to cluck in disapproval to admit that entertainment is all the things its detractors say it is: fun, effortless, sensational, mindless, formulaic, predictable and subversive. In fact, one might argue that those are the very reasons so many people love it. At the same time it is not hard to see why cultural aristocrats in the nineteenth century and intellectuals in the twentieth hated entertainment and why they predicted, as on typical nineteen century critic railed, that its eventual effect would be “to overturn all morality, to poison the springs of domestic happiness, to dissolve the ties of our social order, and to involve our country in ruin.” Write a thoughtful and carefully constructed essay in which you use specific evidence to defend, challenge, or qualify the assertion that entertainment has the capacity to “ruin” society.


Set your timer for 40 minutes. This is a timed writing. In your comments, assign a number to your classmates essay. Scores range from 0 to 9. Give a reason for your score.