Tuesday, March 3, 2009

Flu season rolls on. Apparently, I felt so awful the last time I posted here that I spelled "past" as "pat." Either that, or watching reality TV on VH1 has melted my brain. Either is a distinct possibility. Take care of yourselves, people! C'est importante!

FCAT is next week; specific schedules will be posted Thursday. We will be reviewing FCAT strategies in my sophy class on Wednesday, Thursday, and Friday of this week before the film screening of Othello. (I will be distributing permission slips tomorrow; they MUST be returned Wednesday if you wish to see selected scenes of this film.)

Sophys: Distribute aforementioned permission slips and focus paper assignment. Also, we are going to review the first of several FCAT strategies (as in, please take it seriously and don't use this as an opportunity to be cute or sarcastic) and look at the style section of Elements. I am so proud that we have finished the play! Isn't it great? From "goats and monkeys" to Ludovico's unfortunate line today, the play is just chockablock with quotable material.

APees: Timed Writing, this time on a porose passage--page 160 in the CLIFF book, otherwise known as the Not Quite as Scary Practice AP Book as the Scary Beige One. This book features a friendly, non-threatening green and yellow cover, and nice big print. Okay! That said, this prompt is delish. . .a passage that might be from a novel that might have been written by someone whose name rhymes with "Blane Mawsten." In other words, all the girliness you can stand. I think prose passages are easier to evaluate in writing than poetic ones, particularly if you have trouble digesting poetry, but this one might cause trouble if you fail to identify the tone. Tone is everything, people!

Like last week, I will grade these as I get them, and pass them back out on Wednesday in class for review. You can safely assume that we will have a weekly AP practice session each week between now and the AP exam.

Oh, and congratulations on the Romanticism project presentations today--they were marvelous. I have never seen such diversity of expression.