Yep. It's February.
February, for the sophys, is also Registration Time. You will be selecting your courses for next year in the coming weeks and we have already begun some significant conversations in class about this matter. Please keep your parental units well-informed about this, and choose wisely. Dr. McMillen's Reservation Report will have more information for you and your parents, and check the Boone website regularly for updates.
(Also, and not insignificantly--it looks like I'm going to be out of town every weekend this month, or most every weekend. E-mail access might be limited, so scholarship-letter-seekers and advice-requesters be warned.)
That said, let's get on with the learnin'!
Gifted English II: Second period HAS to take that quiz. Goodness. We keep missing it. . .
Both classes will review the format for a thesis statement today, just for giggles, and then do some pre-reading activities for Othello, Moor of Venice. Also, we need to talk about FCAT Explorer, which has been freshly updated with review materials in reading, science, and math.
AP Lit and Comp: Finish the questions for "Tintern Abbey," then launch headlong into all things Coleridge. The man was a GENIUS. Probably a bit of a pathological liar, too, but haven't you noticed that none of the writers we have encountered are, well, normal? To wit:
Keats--tubercular, poor, and sad. Shelley--angsty, atheistic, ran away with a 15-year-old idealist. Wordsworth--terrible, terrible teeth, and abandoned his French lover and their CHILD. Coleridge--opium addict, insomniac, incurable Romantic. And these are our role models. Oy, vey. And don't forget Blake, who was most likely suffering from some paranoid delusions all his life.
Coleridge, though. . .I have a soft spot in my heart for the fellow, since he was so very smart and so very willing to share said smarts with the world. Here are some choice Coleridge quotes to contemplate on a brisk February day:
- A man may devote himself to death and destruction to save a nation; but no nation will devote itself to death and destruction to save mankind.
- A man's as old as he's feeling. A woman as old as she looks.
- A man's desire is for the woman, but the woman's desire is rarely other than for the desire of the man.
- A mother is a mother still, The holiest thing alive.
- A poet ought not to pick nature's pocket. Let him borrow, and so borrow as to repay by the very act of borrowing. Examine nature accurately, but write from recollection, and trust more to the imagination than the memory.
- Advice is like snow - the softer it falls, the longer it dwells upon, and the deeper in sinks into the mind.
- Alas! they had been friends in youth; but whispering tongues can poison truth.
- All sympathy not consistent with acknowledged virtue is but disguised selfishness.
- All thoughts, all passions, all delights Whatever stirs this mortal frame All are but ministers of Love And feed His sacred flame.
- And though thou notest from thy safe recess old friends burn dim, like lamps in noisome air love them for what they are; nor love them less, because to thee they are not what they were.
- As I live and am a man, this is an unexaggerated tale - my dreams become the substances of my life.
