Things Fall Apart/The Metamorphosis

Thursday and Friday we will have our essay for In the Time of the Butterflies and then we will be ready to start our next two books: Things Fall Apart by Chinua Achebe and Franz Kafka's The Metamorphosis. You can start reading the Metamorphosis now - it is only about 55 pages long. We will start reading Things Fall Apart next week.

To get you started, here is a link to the Sparknotes page for Things Fall Apart and here is a link to The Metamorphosis Sparknotes page. Remember - Sparknotes is there to help you understand the book - not to take the place of reading it!

In the Time of the Butterflies doesn't have a Sparknotes page yet - so hopefully you read carefully and thought about the book!

Scholarships

The latest edition of the AHS Scholarship Bulletin is now available in the career center. Stop by and go through the file to see what scholarships are available. There are at least four which have applications due in March.

The Alhambra Latino Association Scholarship application is available here and is due March 14th. You need at least one letter of recommendation and an official transcript - these take time to get, so start NOW.

Benchmark!

Tomorrow (March 6th) we will write the benchmark essay. Here is a copy of the rubric used to grade these essays in case you want to check it out:

Analytic Rubric

Each essay will be given a score from 1-6. For the purposes of our class, this is the grade scale I will use:

6 = 100 (A+)
5+ = 95 (A)
5 = 90 (A-)
4+ = 85 (B)
4 = 79 (C+)
4- = 74 (C)
3+ = 70 (C-)
3 = 65 (D)
2 = 55 (F)
1 = 45 (F)
You can only get a zero if you did not do the essay at all, if it was written in a language other than English, if you cheated on or plagiarized all or part of the essay, etc.

Hamlet Speeches

It's time for Hamlet Speeches! Here are the speeches if you lost yours or just want a clean copy:

Hamlet Speeches

And here is the schedule of who goes when. Remember that if you are absent, you must go FIRST the day you come back.