Wednesday in class--
Well,  classes wound up all over the place:  good progress in 2nd, zero progress in 3rd (lock-down), and 6th was somewhere in between.  Even homework (or the lack thereof) was different.

Thursday in class--
So today was a bit uneven as well.  What I can say for sure is the following:

• By now everyone should have the text of Beowulf (though a few in 6th have hand-outs only, and you will get successive sets).
• 2nd and 3rd received a "Glossary of Names" to help you keep track as we read.  This is taken from the book that 6th period is using (p. 124 and following), so the only people who got the hand-out in 6th are the ones who don't have a book.
• By now everyone has seen the PowerPoint on the history of the Beowulf text.  It is important; you need to know the three dates associated with the text (time of the actual events, time of oral composition by a scop,  and the time that the poem was written down), the nature and transmission of stories developed orally, the two collectors associated with the text, and what happened to the manuscript.
• So you need to have a way to view this if you were absent, and to review it later.  Here's where to find it: Beowulf PowerPoint
• We discussed the Prologue, which is the section covered by lines 1-63 in the Heaney translation.

FOR TOMORROW

Everyone was assigned to read more:

• 2nd and 3rd:  you need to read to p. 17, through line 228
• 6th:  I made a mistake and told you only up to Section 2.  It would be to your advantage, though, to read 2 and most of 3. 

Going forward--reading ahead will always be okay so long as you double back and review as we go. The people who read ahead and then review are always the most successful with this  text.

Everyone should expect a fairly rapid reading pace starting on Monday.