Mr. G's Internet Inventory

AP LITERATURE and COMPOSITION 2012-2013

Hey literary scholars! Those seeking a challenging, rigorous Advanced Placement program fashioned in the college course model may consider AP Literature and Composition:

Here's the SYLLABUS AND OVERVIEW FOR AP LIT NEXT YEAR.

Interested?

All students wishing to enroll must submit a SAMPLE ESSAY based on THIS PROMPT.

Turn in your sample Mr. Guinan by Wednesday, April 4(the day before spring break!)

Hope Springs Eternal!

Torah Academy Lions Baseball Club

WATCH AND VOTE!!

1. Click on the link to our video and rate away!

2. For kicks, feel free to watch other videos. You will see, there's no comparison. CTA's Film Studies work is the best.

The Best Novels of the Last 100 Years

What are the great America novels of the last hundred years? In a new monthly series, novelist Nathaniel Rich sets out to find the forgotten, justly praised, and surprisingly timely.

Divergent Thinking, redux

For those Inventory fans, we posted this last year. Just watched it again. It's worth seeing, at least twice.

SUMMER READING

What should I read this summer? In my view, nothing heavy. Stay off the theory. Leave Levi-Strauss on the shelf. Ulysses can wait. How about one of those books that you start and carry with you, on the train, on the plane, in the car, by the pool. A book that you take with you across the room because you can't put it down. Here are the summer reading assignments for summer 2011:

Advanced Placement Language and Composition

10th Grade American Literature

8th Grade Language Arts

Also check out the class blogs for hints about the assignments, or for further readings.

Happy Summer!

is school obsolete?

Writing Sites

Mr. G's Writing Rules the ongoing struggle to avoid a national dialog of any kind.
The sportswriting and pop culture experiment, Grantland
McSweeny's, the hipster lit site, with new writing, lists, monologues, and a bag of chips.
Test your vocab skills at Free Rice.
Your writing will go only as far as your transitions allow you. Sometimes it's as easy as using these transitional phrases from the University of North Carolina writing center.
Use the words to write a poem, a sentence, a trophy, a commitment, a smoke, a plunger...Check out the random word generator.
A writing prompt for every day of the year
Writer's Digest Writing Prompts, also in the writer's notebook
Three hundred and forty six writing prompt
You can turn an essay or list into a graphic image at woordle.
Looking for the poem of the day? Here's Garrison Keilor's Writer's Almanac.
Watch words literally explode with meaning at the visual dictionary.
Can you Haiku?
Survey all the things that need names at Phrontistery
With Similes like these, who needs an enemy?
Billy Collins's Poem for each day of the year

Baseball Writing

Cardboard Gods: One of my favorite--nostalgic writing about baseball cards, takes me back to Cooks grocery store, and the flour-coated hard pink stick of baseball card gum. Josh Wilker's book is forthcoming.

A love letter to the game, Bart Giamatti's Green Fields of the Mind. It's even better if you can find the audio, the audience lurching, as though they themselves were in the stands, watching the unfolding of the last ballgame.

A list of great moments:
Gibson's shot off Gossage in 84

Of all the action that takes place in a baseball season, perhaps the meeting at home plate before the game on June 4 will be the most memorable moment of the year, or, for the umpire Jim Joyce, of any year.

For my money the most singularly telling statistic: win probability, thanks to fangraphs