During today's Spanish class, we practiced reading comprehension and also conversational Spanish by talking about plans for the summer.

We completed our series of essay writing classes by focusing on writing a comparison essay and a symbol/theme essay. With respect to the comparison essay, I discussed the literary device of a foil and examined the Russian harlequin as a foil to Kurtz. Our second essay addressed the Russian harlequin's motley attire as a mirror of the multi colored map of Africa dividing the continent into European sectors which Marlow views in the Company's office .We then addressed how the European zeitgeist evidenced by the map contributed to Kurtz' moral corruption. Nina diligently located supporting quotes from the novel for both essays and worked on using commentary to create paragraph cohesion. We then edited the drafts by eliminating extra words, by employing active verbs instead of the passive tense, and by combining sentences where necessary. Additionally, I demonstrated how to reorder words within a sentence to vary sentence beginnings and offered word choice suggestions. At the conclusion of the sessions, Nina had completed two well drafted essays.

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During today's Spanish classes, we continued practicing reading comprehension.

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During our first session, we studied Chinua Achebe's widely read essay," Racism in Conrad's Heart of Darkness." Mr Achebe is a native of Nigeria who argues the novel contains a residue "of antipathy to black people." We analyzed the essay to first locate the thesis and then highlighted his support for the argument with an emphasis on paying attention to the writing craftsmanship .Nina then discussed her views on the essay and articulated where she disagreed with the writer. We specifically noted that regardless of one's opinion of the writer's point of view, he validly observes that the Native Africans portrayed in the novel are flat dimensionless figures who appear to serve as backdrops for the European characters. During our next session, we continued our work on essay writing using the five essay writing exercises I prepared. Nina completed an essay on atavism and the symbolism of darkness in the novel. I demonstrated how to condense sentences by transforming static intransitive verbs into active more descriptive verbs. We further worked on how to smoothly embed quotes into a sentence, and where to reorder sentences within the paragraph.

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During today's Spanish class, we worked on reading several passages and talking about them.

As Nina completed the novel over the weekend, we discussed what Nina enjoyed about the novel(reading it) as well as her criticisms of the oblique ending and her observation that the novel's harsh critique of European colonialism was important but still somewhat outdated. We then parsed the last pages drenched in verbal and dramatic irony wherein Marlow visits Kurtz' fiancee and abandons his reverence for truth to maintain the fiancee's illusion that Kurtz was a great noble man. We identified the irony and double meaning of each line of Marlow's conversation with Kurtz' fiancee. This led to the philosophical examination of whether truth or illusion and Faith have greater value and under what circumstances illusions must be maintained. We tied this discussion to the illusion /reality motif and to the great"Idea" or pretense that justifies colonial exploitation that Marlow alluded to in the opening pages . In this same vein, we compared Kurtz' European fiancee with his paramour ,an African Native, as representations of this dichotomy . During our final session, we reviewed Nina's study guide homework which addressed Marlow's (and Conrad's) bleak view of life as purposeless and futile. Last, we reviewed all of the vocabulary(taken from the novel) that will appear on the final exam.