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!

Podcast Coming Soon!

Wirthy English podcast coming soon to this site!
(Be the first to hear it).

College Admissions Essay Helpers

Sample questions, tips on writing an essay, and more can be found at:

http://www.collegeboard.com/article/0,3868,5-26-0-108,00.html

http://www.quintcareers.com/college_application_essay.html

Resume Writing Resources

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)

Welcome to the 2006 - 2007 School Year!

Please bookmark this space and check back for updates. Major assignments, information on thematic units, useful links, as well as extra credit opportunities will be posted here.

Extra Credit / Alternative to Booknotes

AP English Students, here is an opportunity to build a bit of community as you do your summer reading -- and to get some extra credit as well:

Each time you post a comment here about one of the summer reading books, you get extra credit -- or can complete one fewer "booknote." For example, post ten comments here over the summer and you only need a total of 70 booknotes (rather than 80) on the two books.

If you complete 80 or more booknotes plus make comments here = extra credit.

Reading more than two books plus booknotes = extra credit.

Extreme English -- Online Research May 25

By the time we got to the take out on Tuesday, you guys were starting to really starting to look like paddlers. But there is still a lot more to learn. Today, you are being asked to research kayak skills and places to paddle in Maine. Take notes and / or print out information -- and be ready to report to the class next time we meet. Aim for a 5 minute detailed report, including photos, maps, or drawings where possible.

Please individually research one (1) kayaking skill or technique using one of the 2 websites below:

Kayaking Skills: Strokes & Braces
Kayaking Techniques

Please individually research one (1) place to padde in Maine (lake, river, or ocean). This could be a place we might go as a class, or it might be a place you might go on your own someday.

Maine Island Trail system
Penobscot Bay Area Sea Kayaking
Whitewater Kayaking in Maine
Listing of River, Lake, & Ocean Trips in Maine
Waterways Paddle Trips (Gotta check out this site! :-)

Biography Project Begins

Students are asked to sign out a biography before February vacation and have 3 - 4 weeks to complete reading it. A biography read for this course should meet one of three criteria: (1)focus on a person from a different time period (2) focus on a person from a different place or who travels to a different place (3) focus on a person from a different culture.

One way to find a biography you might be interested in is to think of an interest, a place, or a person who interests you and then search for that topic (include the word biography in your search) at Amazon.com

Hamlet Question paper

This essay, due before February vacation, should be based on one of the unanswered questions presented by the play (Why does Hamlet wait so long to kill Claudius? Does Hamlet love Ophelia? How much did the Queen know about King Hamlet's death). An interesting and helpful Hamlet site is at http://www.pathguy.com/hamlet.htm