English 3: Capstone

1. English 3: Capstone Quarter 4 – Night School Mr. Parker (2014)

2. Part I: The Novel Students will complete the reading of a novel chosen from the list below. It is expected that students complete the novel within the quarter, and stay up to date with weekly blog assignments. • Nectar in a Sieve • The Kite Runner • Purple Hibiscus • Things Fall Apart • Three Cups of Tea • Heart of Darkness • Slaughterhouse Five • Fahrenheit 451 • The Curious Case of the Dog in the Night-time • *upon request, students may propose an alternative selection

3. Part II: The Blog • Create a blog on Wordpress.com • Each week, students will be responsible for a reader response blog post highlighting various elements of the novel from the previous day’s reading. • Students will also post fiction/non-fiction work to the blog; links to sources will be posted and completed SOAPSTone/TPCASTT will be attached upon completion.

4. Part III: Non-Fiction • Students will search credible sources for related material. • Choose a non-fiction article of historical significance with topics and subject matter related to your novel. • Choose a non-fiction article of a current event with topics and subject matter related to your novel. • Complete a SOAPSTone outlining the elements of the article. • In addition to a SOAPSTone, students will also write a paragraph (3-5 sentences) connecting the piece to the novel.

5. Part IV: Fiction • Students will search credible sources for related material. • Choose a poem or short story with topics and subject matter related to your novel. • Complete a TPCASTT outlining the elements of the poem. • Complete a reader response outlining the elements of a short story. • For either a poem or short story, students will also write a paragraph (3-5 sentences) connecting the piece to the novel.

6. The Calendar • Group A: Independent Reading Monday, Computer work Wednesday • Group B: Computer work Monday, Independent Reading Wednesday • Students are responsible for one reader response post, and either one non-fiction or one fiction post per week. • Upon completion of blog work, students may use any remaining class time to read independently. • Books will remain in the classroom, but may be checked out under individual circumstances.

7. Nectar in a Sieve • Author: Kamala Markandaya • In a small village in India, a simple peasant woman recalls her life as a child bride, a farmer's wife, and a devoted mother amidst fights to meet changing times, poverty, and disaster. This is the very moving story of a woman in India whose whole life was a gallant and persistent battle to care for those she loved.

8. The Kite RUnner • Author: KhaledHosseini • The unforgettable, heartbreaking story of the unlikely friendship between a wealthy boy and the son of his father's servant, The Kite Runner is a beautifully crafted novel set in a country that is in the process of being destroyed. It is about the power of reading, the price of betrayal, and the possibility of redemption; and an exploration of the power of fathers over sons—their love, their sacrifices, their lies.A sweeping story of family, love, and friendship told against the devastating backdrop of the history of Afghanistan over the last thirty years,

9. Purple Hibiscus • Author: ChimamandaNgoziAdichie • Fifteen-year-old Kambili and her older brother Jaja lead a privileged life in Enugu, Nigeria. They live in a beautiful house, with a caring family, and attend an exclusive missionary school. They're completely shielded from the troubles of the world. Yet, as Kambili reveals in her tender-voiced account, things are less perfect than they appear. Although her Papa is generous and well respected, he is fanatically religious and tyrannical at home—a home that is silent and suffocating. • As the country begins to fall apart under a military coup, Kambili and Jaja are sent to their aunt, a university professor outside the city, where they discover a life beyond the confines of their father’s authority. Books cram the shelves, curry and nutmeg permeate the air, and their cousins’ laughter rings throughout the house. When they return home, tensions within the family escalate, and Kambili must find the strength to keep her loved ones together.

10. Things Fall Apart • Author: Chinua Achebe • Things Fall Apart tells two intertwining stories, both centering on Okonkwo, a “strong man” of an Ibo village in Nigeria. The first, a powerful fable of the immemorial conflict between the individual and society, traces Okonkwo’s fall from grace with the tribal world. The second, as modern as the first is ancient, concerns the clash of cultures and the destruction of Okonkwo's world with the arrival of aggressive European missionaries. These perfectly harmonized twin dramas are informed by an awareness capable of encompassing at once the life of nature, human history, and the mysterious compulsions of the soul.

11. The Curious Case of the Dog in the Night-time • Author: Mark Haddon • Christopher John Francis Boone knows all the countries of the world and their capitals and every prime number up to 7,057. He relates well to animals but has no understanding of human emotions. He cannot stand to be touched. And he detests the color yellow.This improbable story of Christopher's quest to investigate the suspicious death of a neighborhood dog makes for one of the most captivating, unusual, and widely heralded novels in recent years.

12. Three Cups of Tea • Author: Greg Mortenson • The astonishing, uplifting story of a real-life Indiana Jones and his humanitarian campaign to use education to combat terrorism in the Taliban’s backyard Anyone who despairs of the individual’s power to change lives has to read the story of Greg Mortenson, a homeless mountaineer who, following a 1993 climb of Pakistan’s treacherous K2, was inspired by a chance encounter with impoverished mountain villagers and promised to build them a school. Over the next decade he built fifty-five schools—especially for girls—that offer a balanced education in one of the most isolated and dangerous regions on earth. As it chronicles Mortenson’s quest, which has brought him into conflict with both enraged Islamists and uncomprehending Americans, Three Cups of Tea combines adventure with a celebration of the humanitarian spirit.

13. Heart of Darkness • Author: Joseph Conrad • The story tells of Charles Marlow, an Englishman who took a foreign assignment from a Belgian trading company as a ferry-boat captain in Africa. Heart of Darkness exposes the myth behind colonization while exploring the three levels of darkness that the protagonist, Marlow, encounters--the darkness of the Congo wilderness, the darkness of the European's cruel treatment of the natives, and the unfathomable darkness within every human being for committing heinous acts of evil. Although Conrad does not give the name of the river, at the time of writing the Congo Free State, the location of the large and important Congo River, was a private colony of Belgium's King Leopold II. Marlow is employed to transport ivory downriver. However, his more pressing assignment is to return Kurtz, another ivory trader, to civilization, in a cover-up. Kurtz has a reputation throughout the region. This symbolic story is a story within a story or frame narrative. It follows Marlow as he recounts from dusk through to late night, to a group of men aboard a ship anchored in the Thames Estuary his Congolese adventure. The passage of time and the darkening sky during the fictitious narrative-within-the-narrative parallel the atmosphere of the story.

14. Slaughterhouse Five • Author: Kurt Vonnegut • Slaughterhouse-Five, an American classic, is one of the world’s great antiwar books. Centering on the infamous firebombing of Dresden, Billy Pilgrim’s odyssey through time reflects the mythic journey of our own fractured lives as we search for meaning in what we fear most. • Kurt Vonnegut's absurdist classic Slaughterhouse-Five introduces us to Billy Pilgrim, a man who becomes unstuck in time after he is abducted by aliens from the planet Tralfamadore. In a plot-scrambling display of virtuosity, we follow Pilgrim simultaneously through all phases of his life, concentrating on his (and Vonnegut's) shattering experience as an American prisoner of war who witnesses the firebombing of Dresden.

15. Fahrenheit 451 • Author: Ray Bradbury • Guy Montag is a fireman. In his world, where television rules and literature is on the brink of extinction, firemen start fires rather than put them out. His job is to destroy the most illegal of commodities, the printed book, along with the houses in which they are hidden.Montag never questions the destruction and ruin his actions produce, returning each day to his bland life and wife, Mildred, who spends all day with her television “family.” But then he meets an eccentric young neighbor, Clarisse, who introduces him to a past where people didn’t live in fear and to a present where one sees the world through the ideas in books instead of the mindless chatter of television.When Mildred attempts suicide and Clarisse suddenly disappears, Montag begins to question everything he has ever known. He starts hiding books in his home, and when his pilfering is discovered, the fireman has to run for his life.