Existentialism

A definition from Wikipedia

Another more complex definition

What an existential teacher / student relationship would look like.

Existentialism at Answers.com

Camus on The Myth of Siysiphus

The Future of Mooshead

The Future of the Moosehead Lake Region is in the news. Important public hearings are taking place in the next few weeks in which Plum Creek's revised development proposal will receive public comment. If approved, the Plum Creek development of the Moosehead Lake region will be the largest development in Maine's history.

For more information, check out:

Maine Natural Resources Defense Council Slideshow

The Plum Creek Plan for Moosehead (Plum Creek's Point of View

Bangor Daily News Article about Upcoming Hearings

Bangor Daily News Article on Reaction to Revised Moosehead Proposal

Topics for Debate & Persuasive Essays

Sites which list topics and links include:

ProCon.org

Questia.com

A useful tool for creating an outline for your topic is at

Readwritethink.org

Tips for writing an essay are at

Essayinfo.com/

Online Resume Builder

BEGIN HERE (and read the note below):
Online Resume Builder

Important note: You can save the resume you complete using the above Online Resume Builder by:
1. Dragging your browser over the resume, copying it, and pasting it into Microsoft Word.
2. Saving the Microsoft Word document on the transfer drive.

Other resume resources:
Resume Tutor from University of Minnesota.

A second online resume builder (click on free trial)

Online Quiz on Sentence Types

Please click here to check your knowledge of sentence types.

College Admission Essay Tips

The College Board has useful section on Essay Skills for the college admissions essay. Included are a section on how to choose a topic and tips on writing the essay itself.

Samples of successful essays can be found at www.quintcareers.com/

The Common Application essay prompts are at https://app.commonapp.org/CommonApp/docs/downloadforms/CommonApp2008.pdf

True fact: You can pay as much as $1000.00 to have a professional essay editing service such as EssayEdge help you with your essay. (Or you can just ask Wirthy and get help for free).

The College Board suggests you compete the following as part of your brainstorming process:

• Discover Your Strengths: Do a little research about yourself: ask parents, friends, and teachers what your strengths are.
• Create a Self-Outline: Now, next to each trait, list five or six pieces of evidence from your life—things you've been or done—that prove your point.
• Find Patterns and Connections: Look for patterns in the material you've brainstormed. Group similar ideas and events together. For example, does your passion for numbers show up in your performance in the state math competition and your summer job at the computer store? Was basketball about sports or about friendships? When else have you stuck with the hard work to be with people who matter to you?

Evaluating Web Sources

Take the online quiz at http://www.quick.org.uk/menu.htm

Then visit the the following pages and complete the chart as outlined by Mr. Wirth:

http://www.weight-loss-institute.com/diet_pills.htm

http://anatrimtabs.blogspot.com/2007/09/what-are-ingredients-of-anatrim.html

http://www.fda.gov/FDAC/features/196_wght.html

Happy surfing!

Welcome to Wirthy English

Glad that you found your way to this blog -- which can serve as a useful resource for Senior English students at SDHS. On a more immediate basis, you can get an extra credit point just by posting a comment in response to this post. (You can post as an annonymous user. Just be sure to include your first name and last initial. i.e. "Ray W. was here" gets you extra credit!

AP English Summer Reading 2007

All students taking AP English in 2006-2007 should complete the following:
(1) Read two of the following books.
(2) Take notes as you read the two books. These "notes" should consist of 40 or more "bookmarks" in the form of post-it notes inserted into the book. Each booknote should be a comment about a particular passage in the book. Ideally your notes will include reflections, observations, analysis, connections, and more. Please write me at rwirth@msad56.org if you have questions.

101 Great Books

Recommended for College-Bound Readers

It's a good idea to talk to your parents, librarians, teachers, and counselor about your reading list. They can help you choose the best books for you from among your many options.

Author	Title
--	Beowulf
Achebe, Chinua	Things Fall Apart
Agee, James	A Death in the Family
Austen, Jane	Pride and Prejudice
Baldwin, James	Go Tell It on the Mountain
Beckett, Samuel	Waiting for Godot
Bellow, Saul	The Adventures of Augie March
Brontë, Charlotte	Jane Eyre
Brontë, Emily	Wuthering Heights
Camus, Albert	The Stranger
Cather, Willa	Death Comes for the Archbishop
Chaucer, Geoffrey	The Canterbury Tales
Chekhov, Anton	The Cherry Orchard
Chopin, Kate	The Awakening
Conrad, Joseph	Heart of Darkness
Cooper, James Fenimore	The Last of the Mohicans
Crane, Stephen	The Red Badge of Courage
Dante	Inferno
de Cervantes, Miguel	Don Quixote
Defoe, Daniel	Robinson Crusoe
Dickens, Charles	A Tale of Two Cities
Dostoyevsky, Fyodor	Crime and Punishment
Douglass, Frederick	Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass
Dreiser, Theodore	An American Tragedy
Dumas, Alexandre	The Three Musketeers
Eliot, George	The Mill on the Floss
Ellison, Ralph	Invisible Man
Emerson, Ralph Waldo	Selected Essays
Faulkner, William	As I Lay Dying
Faulkner, William	The Sound and the Fury
Fielding, Henry	Tom Jones
Fitzgerald, F. Scott	The Great Gatsby
Flaubert, Gustave	Madame Bovary
Ford, Ford Madox	The Good Soldier
Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von	Faust
Golding, William	Lord of the Flies
Hardy, Thomas	Tess of the d'Urbervilles
Hawthorne, Nathaniel	The Scarlet Letter
Heller, Joseph	Catch 22
Hemingway, Ernest	A Farewell to Arms
Homer	The Iliad
Homer	The Odyssey
Hugo, Victor	The Hunchback of Notre Dame
Hurston, Zora Neale	Their Eyes Were Watching God
Huxley, Aldous	Brave New World
Ibsen, Henrik	A Doll's House
James, Henry	The Portrait of a Lady
James, Henry	The Turn of the Screw
Joyce, James	A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man
Kafka, Franz	The Metamorphosis
Kingston, Maxine Hong	The Woman Warrior
Lee, Harper	To Kill a Mockingbird
Lewis, Sinclair	Babbitt
London, Jack	The Call of the Wild
Mann, Thomas	The Magic Mountain
Marquez, Gabriel García	One Hundred Years of Solitude
Melville, Herman	Bartleby the Scrivener
Melville, Herman	Moby Dick
Miller, Arthur	The Crucible
Morrison, Toni	Beloved
O'Connor, Flannery	A Good Man is Hard to Find
O'Neill, Eugene	Long Day's Journey into Night
Orwell, George	Animal Farm
Pasternak, Boris	Doctor Zhivago
Plath, Sylvia	The Bell Jar
Poe, Edgar Allan	Selected Tales
Proust, Marcel	Swann's Way
Pynchon, Thomas	The Crying of Lot 49
Remarque, Erich Maria	All Quiet on the Western Front
Rostand, Edmond	Cyrano de Bergerac
Roth, Henry	Call It Sleep
Salinger, J.D.	The Catcher in the Rye
Shakespeare, William	Hamlet
Shakespeare, William	Macbeth
Shakespeare, William	A Midsummer Night's Dream
Shakespeare, William	Romeo and Juliet
Shaw, George Bernard	Pygmalion
Shelley, Mary	Frankenstein
Silko, Leslie Marmon	Ceremony
Solzhenitsyn, Alexander	One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich
Sophocles	Antigone
Sophocles	Oedipus Rex
Steinbeck, John	The Grapes of Wrath
Stevenson, Robert Louis	Treasure Island
Stowe, Harriet Beecher	Uncle Tom's Cabin
Swift, Jonathan	Gulliver's Travels
Thackeray, William	Vanity Fair
Thoreau, Henry David	Walden
Tolstoy, Leo	War and Peace
Turgenev, Ivan	Fathers and Sons
Twain, Mark	The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn
Voltaire	Candide
Vonnegut, Kurt Jr.	Slaughterhouse-Five
Walker, Alice	The Color Purple
Wharton, Edith	The House of Mirth
Welty, Eudora	Collected Stories
Whitman, Walt	Leaves of Grass
Wilde, Oscar	The Picture of Dorian Gray
Williams, Tennessee	The Glass Menagerie
Woolf, Virginia	To the Lighthouse
Wright, Richard	Native Son

Literacy 9 Assignment for Monday, May 21

1. Read the directions below carefully before doing anything.
2. Please follow the directions exactly. If you don't, chaos could result.
3. Go to www.wordpress.com and type in the following username and password:

username: literacy 9
password: explorations

4. Click "Login"
5. Then under the heading for "Your Blogs" click "Literacy 9"
6. Then click "View Site" near the top of the page.
7. Follow the directions on that page.
8. Happy blogging!

Literacy 9 Assignment for Monday, Feb. 12

Today, I'd like you to use the Literacy 9 class as follows:

(1) first 40 minutes of class -- online computer critical thinking challenges, including some really fun ones. See below.
(2) next 30 minutes of class -- silent independent reading.
(3) last 10 minutes of class. Write and submit a recap of (a) what computer challenges you attempted / what you learned, and also (b) what you read about during the independent reading period. This "recap" should be 1/2 page or more in length and should be submitted to the basket on my desk.

Online critical thinking challenges:

1. Growth of Knowledge in your lifetime
2. Missionaries and Cannibals
3. Wolf, Sheep, and Cabbage
4. Vocabulary Challenge

English Without Borders: White Man's Burden Unit

Look up the definition of imperialism.
Look up definitions for parody and satire.

Re-Read the Kipling poem, "White Man's Burden." Copy of poem should be on front table. Students already have copies of this poem. Poem is also at http://www.boondocksnet.com/ai/kipling/kipling.html

In what way does the poem reflect imperialistic ideas?

Browse through the response poems at http://www.boondocksnet.com/ai/kipling/index.html

Working with a partner, choose one of the response poems (must be more than 12 lines). Complete 2 of the handout (students already have this handout) by responding to the questions about the response poem.

Next, create your own response to Kipling's poem about imperialism. This may be in the form of a poem, a cartoon, or a letter to the editor.

Literacy 9 Assignment for Jan. 16

Please go to http://www.snopes.com and then complete the following:

1. Choose a category.
2. Choose an urban legend marked with a red circle -- this means the urban legend is false
3. Click on the link associated with that urban legend. (If there is no link, choose another legend)
4. Read the article associated with that urban legend.
5. Write a half page summary of the story behind the urban legend and how it became accepted as truth.
6. Add a brief statement to number 5 on what you learned from this activity.

While half the class is completing the above assignment, the other half should be on the computers completing Carmen SanDiego cases. Have fun!