Tuesday, December 15, 2009

Into the Wild Resources

Links for your Into the Wild interpretation are at:
http://delicious.com/wirth_ray/mccandless

Wednesday, December 02, 2009

1. Please read and discuss the "Evaluating Your Sources" handout together as a class.

2. Below are a few tips related to the handout:
---Authority (authorship) can often be determining by scanning the top of the web page, the bottom of the web page, and the "about us" page (if any). Keep in mind that unless the person is famous and/or known to you, a name only tells so much. Who is this person? What do they do for a living? What kind of education do they have?
---Objectivity: Is the site selling anything? Trying to persuade you of anything? Are there ads on the site?
---Authenticity / Reliability: Is there an organization, corporation, or educational institution associated with the site? What is it? As before, look at the top of the web page, the bottom of the web page, and the "about us" page (if any).
---Timeliness: Is there a date provided somewhere on the page or even in the copyright (if any) at the bottom of the page?

3. Visit each of the 3 diet sites below and complete the chart by making comments about these sites in each respective box in the chart:
Weight Loss Center (article)
Medicine.Net (article)
Diet Pills Hoopla & Hype (article)

Coming Soon:
You can travel into space for $200,000.00
Right now you can go to
The End of the Internet for free.
Check it out!

Sunday, November 22, 2009

Beowulf Resources

Beowulf -- Translations.net

Beowulf -- Easy to read version

Beowulf -- Hypertext version

Monday, October 19, 2009

College Essay -- Resources

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?

Wednesday, October 07, 2009

American Parks Network, History of Acadia

John William Uhler, Acadia National Park Information Guide -- History

Acadia.net, History of Acadia

National Park Service, Acadia -- History & Culture

Park Vision, Acadia National Park -- Photographs

Tuesday, September 29, 2009

Click the link directly below (but first read the following note):
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 Open Office.
2. Naming and saving the document .

Other resume resources:
Resume Builder from Emurse

Sunday, September 27, 2009

The "Glue" of a Good Essay: Transitions

A list of transitions and guide to their use is at:
www.rscc.cc.tn.us/owl&writingcenter/

Friday, September 25, 2009

Resume Heading Suggestions

Activities
Activities & Interests
Additional Experience
Additional Skills
Additional Training
Affiliations
Associations
Awards/Recognitions

Career Goal
Career Objective
Certifications
Coaching Experience Achievements
Community Involvement
Community Service
Computer Skills
Conferences Attended

Education
Employment
Employment History
Employment Objective
Experience

Goals

Highlights of Qualifications
Hobbies & Interests
Honours & Awards

Language Skills

Memberships Extracurricular Activities

Objective

Personal Achievements
Presentations
Publications

Qualifications

Related Activities
Related Experience
Relevant Experience
Relevant Skills

Scholarships & Awards
Skills
Special Skills
Summary of Qualifications

Teaching Experience
Technical Skills
Training

Volunteer Activities
Volunteer Experience
Volunteer Work
Work Experience

Tuesday, September 22, 2009

Wild Places Essay -- Resources

National Parks, State Parks: Do They Help or Hurt the Local Economy?
Maine Woods National Park: The Economic Value of Protecting Wildlands

Maine ASCE Report Card: State Parks

Plum Creek Development Wins Recommendation of LURC Staff

Plum Creek Considerations -- Bangor Daily News

Restore.org article

Natural Places: Do we need them? If so, why?
Why Kids Need a Big Dose of Nature (US News & World Report)
"Nature Deficit Disorder" (No Child Left Inside)
"Why is Environmental Education Important?" (No Child Left Inside)
"Videophilia: A New Kind of Childhood" (CYfernet)
"Kids Lose Interest in Nature . . . " (Greenchange)

Friday, September 04, 2009

Storm Wave Hits Acadia: Articles & Videos

Witnesses recount MDI wave tragedy
Eyewitness: Giant Wave at Acadia Came out of Nowhere
Belmont teen thought he was going to die along Acadia’s shore
Girl, 7, Dies After Rogue Wave Sweeps Her Out to Sea
Child Dead After Rogue Wave Blasts Boat

Additional Links:
YouTube: Thunder Hole Acadia National Park- Hurricane Bill 08/23/2009
CBS Evening News Video: Hazardous Hurricane Waves
Village Soup: Eyewitness Account

Wednesday, August 26, 2009

Welcome to Senior English 2009-2010!

Welcome to the 2009 - 2010 school year. My hope for each of you is that you can arrive in class with enthusiasm, persistence, and a sense of purpose. These qualities will carry you a long way down the road toward graduation -- and a successful life.

This blog will be an important resource throughout the year. Please bookmark it on your browser so you can find your way back later. (Simply google "wirthy english" if using another computer.)

As part if our begining of the year goalsetting process, you will be completing a practice Accuplacer exam. This exam is used by colleges after you have already been admitted to place you in classes and also to determine if you need to do any remedial work in English or mathematics.

Many students enter their senior year feeling like they really don't need much but a diploma. Taking a practice Accuplacer will help you find out if you are as ready as you may think you are.

An useful resource that includes practice questions for the Accuplacer is at:
www.testprepreview.com/accuplacer_practice.htm

Not all of you will go to college, but we want and expect all of you to be college ready.

Wednesday, June 17, 2009

AP Option 2009-2010 Summer Reading

All students taking AP English in 2009-2010 should complete the following:
(1) Read one required novel: either Cormac McCarthy, All the Pretty Horses or Barbara Kingsolver, The Bean Trees.
(2) Read one choice novel. This novel should come from the reading lists below or from one of the lists provided as a handout.
(3) Post your responses on the online forum at http://2liveis2learn.proboards105.com/
OR 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.

I'm strongly encouraging students to post in the online forum rather than taking "booknotes" but have left the booknote option primarily for those students without internet access. See you on the forum.

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

Wednesday, June 03, 2009

Top Ten Forecasts for 2009 and Beyond

A top 10 list of predictions from The Futurist magazine is at:
http://www.wfs.org/Sept-Oct08/Nov-Dec%20FUTURIST/topTen.htm

Thursday, May 28, 2009

English Without Borders Assignment -- May 28, 2009

(1) Please choose and read 1 article at:
http://www.newsoffuture.com/

Also read choose and read 1 article from among the following sites:

http://www.futureforall.org/ A Layperson's View of Future Technology and Society
http://www.globalfutureonline.org A World Vision Journal of Human Development
http://www.globalfuturist.com Harnessing the Power of Innovation
http://www.wfs.org World Future Society

(2) Then post a summary in your own words of the 2 articles in the "Links to the Future" thread on the forum at http://2liveis2learn.proboards.com/

(3) Use the remaining time in the class to work on Future Projects and/or to read their future novels. Novels and projects should be complete by next Friday.

Tuesday, May 26, 2009

Links to the Future

newsoffuture.com Future News for Year 2020 and Beyond

futureforall.org/ A Layperson's View of Future Technology and Society

globalfutureonline.org A World Vision Journal of Human Development

globalfuturist.com Harnessing the Power of Innovation

thefutureofourworld.ytmnd.com The Future of Our World

wfs.org World Future Society

Monday, March 30, 2009

Assignment for Monday, March 30

Biographies were to be completed last week. Any student who has not completed his/her biography should use some of the class time today for reading.
Reading conference sheet also due last week.
Genre piece planning sheet (chart). Please complete this as well.
Drafts of 3 genre pieces (totaling 3 or more pages in length) are due by the end of the class on Friday.
Begin research by locating and bookmarking online sources for topics related to your biography.

Tuesday, March 24, 2009

AP English Literature -- Exam Prep. Links

College Board: AP English Literature
(Program Description, Test Information, Sample Questions, more)

Just for Advanced Placement Students
(Practice Questions, Program Info., & more)

Tuesday, March 17, 2009

Creating a Bibliography and Works Cited Page

An easy way to organize and format your bibliography and works cited page is at:

www.easybib.com/

A sample bib. entry for an Amazon.com review of Into the Wild is below:

"Into the Wild." Amazon.com. 17 Mar. 2009 .

(Note, author of the review and date of review is not available, so that information is omitted).