Our root word for today was frater, which means brother. Our example words were fraternity, fraternize and fratricide.

After second period we were provided with a very good student sample of the essay due today. Debbie, Arial, Brian and Aaron did a wonderful job identifying the irony used to produce humor in Mark Twain’s “The First Writing Machine.”

“The First Writing Machine” is a story Mark Twain wrote that contains immense amounts of cruel irony. As we know today, new technology can have a lot of problems that, at the store, don’t seem to exist. So, you spend your hard earned money on a product, and find out that it didn’t really work the way it was suppose to. Well, back in the 1800’s, that happened to our very own Mark Twain, a story of irony at the cruelest.
Our first example of humor is when Mark Twain purchases the machine at the store, where a girl was typing at 57 words per minute, much faster than a person could write, the only other alternative at the time. So, the impressed Mark Twain purchased it, only to find that the girl had found a trick, typing the same thing over and over. Such irony in this sales pitch, as this happens even today. The second example of irony is when Twain hired a girl to type his letters, but the machine could only write in big, ugly capital letters. Would you like to receive a letter like that?

This is only the first two paragraphs of their essay. They did go on to give even more explanation and a summary paragraph. Great job and thanks for the student example.

While we were on the blog reviewing the information from yesterday, everyone had an opportunity to earn 10 extra credit points. In a well-written response we were ask to identify all of the countries that have visited our blog.

Tomorrow we begin the actual task of our webquest. For those students who had already turned in their essays, marking their completion of step 3 of the webquest, Mrs. Scales redirected groups to read over the specific task information of the webquest.

Task – Your small publication company has been invited to compete for the contract to write and design a presentation that will be available to the Kennedy Center visitors throughout the year. It might be a brochure, a slide/multimedia project, a video or a web site, but this product will explain why the highest award our country can bestow upon a comedian is named for Mark Twain.