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Peace, Land, Pizza! All Power to the Platypus!

Happy May 1st, everyone.  May is the last full month of school, and it's always the period when student revolutionary fervor roils just beneath the surface of the classroom.  Every little huddle of students looks like a Committee of Public Safety, and you start to worry that they might all show up to school one day wearing brown.  Was that the Internationale I heard coming from the boys' locker room?

In all seriousness, my students have performed well this year.  They have survived quite the literary blitz.  This year's reading list included:

The Aeneid
Beowulf
The Prince
Hamlet
Julius Caesar
Sense and Sensibility
Wuthering Heights
Jane Eyre
Great Expectations
Idylls of the King
Pygmalion
Orthodoxy
Peralandra
Mere Christianity
The Screwtape Letters
The Chronicles of Narnia
A Separate Peace

All in all, I think we laid a good ground work for future studies.  My Tenth graders, for instance, can now claim to have read most of the Old and New Testaments, The Iliad, The Odyssey, Antigone, The Aeneid, The Prince, Romeo and Juliet, Julius Caesar, Robinson Crusoe, Jane Eyre, A Christmas Carol, Great Expectations, The Idylls of the King (the Arthur Legends), Lord of the Flies, Peralandra, and A Separate Peace.  That gets them quite a few of their bases covered and they should be eminently ready to branch out in any number of directions in the years to come. 

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