Last call for Lear

If you are interested in attending the Thursday, September 10, performance of "King Lear" at Notre Dame's Washington Hall, please let me know by TOMORROW, Tuesday, September 1. I will need to order the tickets this week to ensure that we will be able to sit together. You are more than welcome to order tickets on your own - just know they will probably be in a different seating section.

Click on the posting title above to be directed to the "King Lear" website. Enjoy your last week of summer and let me know via blog post or email if you plan on attending this performance.

Happy reading!

King Lear is coming!

Good morning...

I hope you had a great weekend despite the rain on Saturday. I had the good fortune of seeing "Twelfth Night" at Notre Dame on Saturday and the performance was FANTASTIC! I've been attending the Shakespeare performances at Notre Dame for a few years now and I would have to say this is the best one they have done. Very entertaining!

And there's more Shakespeare excitement to come! From September 9-11, actors from The London Stage will be performing "King Lear," which just happens to be on our AP reading list. I was thinking about attending the Thursday, September 10 performance and wanted to put feelers out to see who would be interested in attending. Click on the title "King Lear is coming" at the top of this post to be directed to the link for the play.

Student tickets are $12 and the performance is 2 hours and 30 minutes and begins at 7:30 PM. It would be a little late for a school night, so please check with your parents first. We'd get back to Bridgman a bit after 11 PM.

The timing of this is really perfect! It isn't often a live Shakespeare performance links up with a play being covered in a course, but we are in luck! Please let me know ASAP if you are in and I will call to get the tickets ordered. I'd like to call this week or early next week to be sure we can get good seats, so let me know.

I hope your reading continues to go well - don't forget you need to finish the second book by September 8, when we head back to school. Enjoy these last two precious weeks of summer and let me know if you are interested in attending the Thursday, September 10 performance of "King Lear"

National Day of Writing - 20 October 2009

A happy rainy Thursday to you all...

In celebration of the National Day of Writing on 20 October 2009, sponsored by the National Council of Teachers of English (NCTE), I have created a writing gallery for the Bridgman Public School District. Click on the title of this post to be directed to the writing gallery. Each submission can be uploaded from an existing document or typed directly into the "create a new submission" page. Each submission will have to be approved before it can be accessed in the gallery - I got us started with a short reflection, but I don't believe it has been approved yet.

We'll talk more about this when the school year starts, but I wanted to let you know this gallery existed and that I encourage you to share your writing in whatever form you choose - poem, short story, personal essay, etc. Keep in mind that teacher, administrators, and parents will have access to this gallery, as well as your peers.

Happy Reading AND Writing!!

MCC

The Syllabus and the Bard

Since I can't quite figure out how to create a link for a Word document on our blog, I will be emailing everyone a copy of the syllabus. This is NOT necessarily the same syllabus you will receive in September - there are a few things I think I will be tweaking - but the content will be the same. You will receive a hard copy of the syllabus in the first week of school, so don't feel the need to print it out.

Also, Notre Dame's Summer Shakespeare Festival is in full swing with its production of "Twelfth Night," running from August 18-23. See the link for performance times. Even if you are not familiar with "Twelfth Night," nothing is better than seeing Shakespeare LIVE! I have attended performances at ND in the past and the cast always does a brilliant job. Tickets are discounted for students at $15 and general adult admission is $25. I will be attending on Saturday, August 23. This is by no means required, just a suggestion from your friendly neighborhood AP English teacher :-) If you do plan on attending one of the performances, please let me know.

And finally, the sweet picture above is the newest addition to the Carter Conklin household. My husband and I adopted a kitten this week. Her name is Natalie Portman. Yes, Natalie Portman. We are both fans of Miss Portman, the actress, and the name just sounds distinguished for someone who weighs about as much as a green pepper.

The weekend is forecasted to be gorgeous, so get away from the computer, get outside, and enjoy the sunshine!

Happy Reading...

We're Approved!!

I received word today from the College Board, the governing body for AP that our course has been approved for the 2009-10 academic year. This is a formality that all new AP courses have to go through. I had to submit the syllabus for the course by August 1, and the content of the course had to meet the requirements set by the College Board. After some minor revisions, I received word this afternoon that the course has been approved, meaning, this course will be recognized as a valid Advanced Placement course and any credits earned (by good marks on the AP exam next May) will transfer to an institute of higher learning. Hooray for AP!!!

Speaking of the syllabus...I have a few things to add to make it more "student friendly," but I was wondering if you would want to see the syllabus before we reconvene in September or can you wait until school is in session to find out what the year will hold? Please let me know either way.

Happy reading!!

Ulysses by James Joyce...

....was the answer for today's literary quiz. See below for more information on the banning and trial...

(from today's Writer's Almanac from American Public Media)

Ulysses stood out to United States officials for its highbrow aura and the publicity it attracted as the newest, most advanced thing in literature. The New York Society for the Suppression of Vice brought The Little Review to trial under the state's obscenity law. The episode from the novel was ruled obscene, and Ulysses was banned in the United States.

The banned book was a hot item on the black market, and Joyce knew he was losing a lot of money to pirate publishers. He wanted an American readership and the royalties that came with it, so his lawyers worked with the executives at Random House to bait the U.S. government into going to trial. In 1933, Random House decided to import a single version of the French edition of Ulysses, and the company had people wait at the New York docks for the book's arrival. It was a hot day and the U.S. Customs inspector didn't want to be bothered with another inspection, but the Random House people made sure that one book was seized.

A second trial, "United States v. One Book Called Ulysses," was held over the fate of that single copy of Ulysses. Judge John Woolsey ruled that the book had no "dirt for dirt's sake" and was not, in fact, pornographic. His ruling changed the standards for literary obscenity. He disregarded the traditional standard for obscenity — whether the work would "deprave and corrupt" a vulnerable young reader — and said that the proper test is whether it would "lead to sexually impure and lustful thoughts" in the average adult. Also, no longer could a single line make a whole book obscene. Woolsey pointed out that the book was so difficult to understand, people would be unlikely to read it for titillation. The Court of Appeals agreed and called Ulysses "a sincere portrayal" and "executed with real art." Ulysses was safe to sell in the United States.

In his opinion for the case, Judge Woolsey wrote: "In respect of the recurrent emergence of the theme of sex in the minds of his characters, it must always be remembered that his locale was Celtic and his season Spring."

Literary Quiz o' the Day

Happy Friday!! Here is today's quiz. Sorry if you detect a pattern here...I can't really help myself sometimes...

It was on this day in 1934 that the United States Court of Appeals ruled in favor of what novel, previously banned in the USA?

Answers will be accepted via email and blog post. Good luck!!!

Poem for Today

Happy August! Here is a poem for the first week of August. I hope your reading is going well and that you are enjoying your favorite summer pastimes - spending time with family and friends, relaxing on the beach, sleeping in :) sunsets and bonfires. Let's hope the weather warms up a bit for our last month of summer.

The Student Theme
Ronald Wallace

The adjectives all ganged up on the nouns,
insistent, loud, demanding, inexact,
their Latinate constructions flashing. Their prounouns
lost their referents: They were dangling, lacked
the stamina to follow the prepositions' lead
in, on, into, to, toward, or from.
They were beset by passive voices and dead
metaphors, conjunctions shouting But! or And!

The active verbs were all routinely modified
by adverbs, that endlessly and colorlessly ran
into trouble with the participles sitting
on the margins knitting their brows like gerunds
(dangling was their problem, too). The author
was nowhere to be seen: was off somewhere.