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Keep your eye on the prize as we head into the home stretch these next couple of months, focusing particularly on your analytical skills in poetry throughout April. If you're behind on your reading, either in Poetry 180 or Cracking the A.P., now is the time to catch up. You'll be doing extensive written work with the former, and the latter contains invaluable advice for the upcoming A.P. exam. (IF you'll do what this book suggests, you'll practically be guaranteed one free semester's worth of college credit, if not TWO semesters' worth.) PLEASE READ, and also memorize the essentials of "The Idea Machine," (their phrase, not mine) the "Big 5 for Prose," and the "Big 5 for Poetry."

Headmaster James and I already have agreed to swap out class dates during April, in order to gain a couple of full mornings for practicing our respective classes' A.P. exams. We'll probably see what coffee shop will allow us to monopolize their conference room for a couple of mornings and meet there (preferably Two Story, but I'll keep you posted).

Continue to work on your Wordsworth memorization, which should be a snap after the excerpt from Chaucer's Prologue. This will be due mid-May.

Please line up one of the following dystopian/post-apocalyptic books by April 15, after which we'll move onto something a little more hopeful with which to wrap up the schoolyear--probably one of C.S. Lewis' works.

Again, check the library for the following titles, and ask them to order a book for you if they don't currently have your preference on the shelf. Thrift stores also are teeming with these:

*The Road, by Cormac McCarthy
1984, by George Orwell
Brave New World, by Aldous Huxley
**A Canticle for Liebowitz, by Walter Miller
The Handmaid's Tale, by Margaret Atwood

*a student favorite
**an Evans favorite

March Forecast and Godspeed

All of us back home will be keeping you wonderful students in our prayers faithfully while you're in Cedar Rapids this week. Know that you'll be exhausted sometime around Saturday or Sunday, when the adrenaline starts wearing off. You can ward off drama by expecting this, shrugging it off, and looking for creatively pro-active ways to help the flood victims.
Remember to "keep the main thing the main thing."

I'll write up a barebones outline of this month's syllabus, possibly subject to change:

Mondays and Thursdays:
Continue to work your way through The Enlightenment and 18th-Century Writers, and expect a unit test sometime around March 30th.

Wednesdays:
March 18-- This month's reader's choice novels must be completed by this date, as you'll most likely be doing an in-class A.P. essay question (a bona fide question from a previous year's test) for a grade. I'll also need your signatures to verify the completion of this task. For those of you reading Heart of Darkness, I strongly suggest you add Things Fall Apart to the assignment, and compare/contrast the two.
**IF you need help with your paper, this will be the time to arrange a lunch or after-school meeting with me.

March 25--Papers due; remember to incorporate principles from Foster's book, along with anything you can apply from the Cracking the A.P. book as well.