I really appriciated having the time to work on our essays in class. I had had a busy week and it was really helpful to have the time to research and plan my essay. I absolutely loved the quote carousel we did a couple weeks ago. We were able to get all our ideas out and see everyone else's in an organized fashion. I was also really impressed by some of the things people said. I'm really enjoying having Mrs. Lawler come in for poetry.

I am enjoying reading Moby Dick. It is nice to be reading a real story rather then the short stuff/textbooks that we have been.

I felt that some of the discussions about Moby Dick went very well. It was interesting to hear that many people had chosen the same quotes, but had different opinions. It was also enjoyable to listen to each member of the class read her essay. It was nice to hear everyone's point of view, as well as the comments mad about the writing.

I like Moby Dick a lot, and I enjoy not having to write pithy quote essays every night. I like the poetry sessions with Mrs. Lawler also. I have learned a lot from her. I like how the class has become less rigid in terms of regularity.

i like our moby dick discussions, i thought that they were interesting and insightful because the book was rich enough to support that kind of discussion.

I liked having Mrs. Lawler in as a guest and talking about poetry. I liked the day which we read the Raven than read different silly versions of it. I had never really looked at the Raven before now. It is a really powerful poem.

I liked how we had two different activities going on in class in one day. We start off with the traditional discussion on the book we are reading, and then we share a few of the essays that we have written, then, a little more than half way through the class, we switch over to poetry discussions. It is nice to have this change because I feel that it helps keep me focused.

I really enjoyed reading and discussing the poetry. I especially liked the poem 'The Bells,' and all the other poems by Poe. I think it would be fun to try writing our own poetry some time.

I really enjoyed the poems that we read with Mrs. Lawler, especially the ones by Poe. I also really like the way that we are doing pithy quotes now. I makes me resent them much less than before!

I thought that reading the essays was really worth while, it was fascinating to hear everyone's opinions on different subjects and it was interesting to hear what everyone came up with.

i thought the moby dick discussions went well in class. they were always very interesting and there were many ideas i didn't think of. i am also very glad to be reading a book again. it's nice to have a plot that you can get into and a continuing story to think about.

It has been a great few weeks in class. I would have to say that my favorite part by far has been writing my persuasive essay. I love being able to freely express my views on a controversial topic, and to have a class listen to and critique my work. I thought that everyone did a great job on their essay, and that is was an enormous success. I also really enjoy reading and discussing Moby Dick. What an excellent few weeks!

Ms. Lawler's poetry readings have been very interesting. I like doing poetry.

Our discussion of poetry with mrs,lawler was interesting and new. I enjoyed it a lot.

Reading and discussing Moby Dick went well for me. I feel that I get a lot out of the reading and even more out of dicussing parts that I do not understand. I liked doing the poetry too!

Something that went well for me this week was reading my essay. I was one of the last people to read because i left it at home after the long Thanksgiving weekend and it was a relief to finaly present. I think my verbal performance of the piece was well done. I thought it was going to be a little difficult but it was a breeze.

The BEST part of this week was that I realized the whole POINT of the class. American Literature is not about creating your own literature. It is not about being avant garde in my writing or expressing myself through words. It is about the 'GreAT AMERICN writers' and how they wrote! This class is actually a very selfless class because we all have to look at soneone else's work and admire its greatness.

The essay readings, Poetry Time with Mrs. Lawler, reading Moby-Dick,assignments for Moby-Dick.

We started Moby Dick! It was a little slow at the beginning but now it is good and I can see the rich, fullness of Melville. I think people did very well on their persuasive essays, nice broad choice of topics and good writing.

Well I would like to look back at the past few weeks. There were a number of things that went well for me. Since football has finished I have been able to spend much more time on my assignments resulting in better focus and grades. I thought the persuasive essays went very well. I enjoyed listening to everyone and their interesting topics. Pithy quote discussions are now more effective due to the large group only. Learning has in this class has been much more fun and I think that's imperative with such a rhetoric-filled novel like Moby-Dick. The variety in class has increased tremendously.

I wish we read all the essays at once, so that we weren't still reading them. I had a really hard time with the House of Usher quiz. I had read it the Tuesday we got out of school and had trouble remembering a lot of the details. I also had a lot of trouble understanding it in the first place, and had planned to come in to class with questions about it, but didn't get a chance to ask them until after the quiz.

For the most part I have been happy with everything we have been doing lately, except for the one night we had to read 47 pages in Moby Dick. That was quite a bit of reading in one night, but at least it was a funny section.

Here is an idea: Since we have started a new book, how about we start a new approach! It is hard for me to focus on the litereary devices of Moby Dick when the plot is so intriguing. What if people chose quotes they enjoyed and we did a carousel around the room thing where the quotes were out and we could look at them and comment on them and find litereary devices from them!!!Fantastic I say. It's different.

I disliked reading my own essay and feel I could have done a better job reading it aloud. I also thought some nights the amount of reading for Moby-Dick were a bit high.

I felt a little flooded by some of the assignments, I probably should have read ahead but to take out 40+ pgs of Moby Dick can be both exciting but time consuming.

I felt that we had A LOT of reading to do this week. It was hard for me to fit it all in.

I personally thought that the poetry unit this week wasn't very effective. First of all, we already analyzed a few of the poems that we went over. The only thing I thought we learned were a few new poetic devices, a number of which we were told we didn't even need to know! It's not a big deal, and maybe other people got more out of the topic. I must admit that I never really like poetry (reading or writing), so maybe this is why I have been so critical of it.

I think that the nightly homework could go better. I realize that as an honors class we are expected to move more quickly through the books we read, it can be overdone. When it gets to a certain point,when I have been reading for perhaps two hours, I begin to lose the ability to fully appreciate and understand the novel. Rather than enjoying it (which I think is a very viable possibility), I dread doing the reading because by the end I am really trudging through it, and must rush to do my other homework in the before 6, when I leave for swim team. If the reading were limited to 25 or 30 pages a night, rather than 35 or 45, I think that I, and many members of the class would get more out of the reading.

I think that we should do something more varied for the Moby Dick homework, for example having us write a reaction to the reading or doing a project on the book. I think that a project like the Scarlet Letter project that gives us some leeway would be a good idea.

I think that we were assigned too much reading this week. I know that the point is to finish the book quickly so that we can move on to other things but it's too much to do all in one night especially on top of other homework.

I think the homework load of reading could have been little less than 40 pages, since Moby Dick is so full of literary richness and it is so important to pay attention to every detail, reading so much of it makee it so that I do not get all that I probably should out of the reading. I tend to get so much more out of the first part the reading, rather than out of after the first 30 pages. I think that we should have tried to get all of the essays read this week, rather than let them stretch out into the next week.

In these past few weeks, I think the reading out loud of essays could have gone better. I am not very good at reading out loud, and I expecially do not like reading my own writing out loud. I was not very fond of my piece of writing and could tell the class was bored while I was reading it. I think it would have been better if we had broken into two large groups and had volunteers read. It wouldn't have been so extensive that way.

It was an excellent week. There's a lot of reading though, and i know seeral students are behind.

Moby Dick conversations have been boring me to death. I would like to do some other sort of activity based around the book, I don't feel like I'm getting much out of class discussions. Some other approach to it would be helpful, I personally find the book boring and hard to get into.

Perhaps a little less reading in Moby Dick. It's a very good book, but one night we needed to read about 45 pages, and it took an extremely long time.

Something that could have been better was the quiz on the fall of the house of usher. I did not read the piece with care and so i did not do as well on it as i might have had I explored it further.

the amount of reading could have gone better. the number of pages we had to read in one night was huge! it took a long time to finish them. also, it was very difficult material, so it was especially hard to understand it after i had been reading for a while. i really hope that in the coming week we have less to read. i like the book, but it's hard to read so much in one night and understand it thoroughly.

The readings have been too long. They are taking over one and ahalf ours to read plus the time for quotes. If they were shorter they would be much more enjoyable.

There was a LOT of homework this week. I like Moby Dick, but I am not able to take in any more information after 45 minutes of reading. It is also very hard to make connections after reading for this long. Every one would enjoy the book more, and be able to get more out of it, if we had less reading to do every night.

While it was nice to have Mrs. Lawler come in and look at poetry more in depth, it would have been better if the poems we looked at were ones that we hadn't already read.

. Sam Macintire inspired me. He wrote an excellent persuasive essay and did a wonderful job reading it. It wasn't this week that he read it but since we didn't have a survey last week to rant about it in, I am putting it in this one. He also did a great job reading the Raven aloud this week.

Amelia Cottle inspired me this week with the essay she wrote about humanity. Although she doesn't always say a lot in the large group, it is clear that she has a lot of interesting thoughts to share, and I look forward to hearing them in the future.

amelia inspired me this past week with her essay. when i first heard her topic, i was kind of shocked. not only was it a difficult topic to tackle, it was also very controversial. however, by the end of her essay i could definitely understand her point and agreed with it. also, her use of rhetorical devices in her essay was impressive.

Amelia really inspired me this week. She blew me away with her essay. I had always heard Amelia was a good writer, but had never had the priviledge to read any of her writing. Now that I have, I get to be the person who tells another how amazing her writing is!

Caroline Eichler has inspired me. She can get really passionate about a topic and always has a great insight or a different way of looking at something. I find everytime I have a conversation with her I am growing and learning. It seems like she is always thinking about what we learn in class, and connecting it to our real life experiences. Its really fun to hear what she has to say.

Chloe really inspired me this week. She had a lot of interesting things to say about what she read in Moby Dick and helped me to think outside of the box.

Fantastic. Superb. Unadultered Omnipotence! All of these adjectives can be used to describe... Charlie Beyer. These are the things that make Charlie a different bolt of cloth: 1. He is a good person to listen to because he gets right to the point. 2. He is overall very positive in the English atmosphere. 3. He is the funniest person to watch when he is spacing out. Thank you very much Mr. CHarlie.

Hey! I was very impressed by Ryan Howe's persuasive essay. He had a lot of great points, and the essay was very well written. I am usually not interested in politics, but Ryan's essay was engaging and made me want to listen. Good job Ryan!

I am going to have to go with Amelia, because of her exceptional persuasive essay on the significance of man. Its an issue I contemplate myself and I was impressed to see someone bring it up. It took some courage to choose that topic and I feel she made great points. Thanks Amelia.

I was inspired this week by Lila trowbridge. She always has something interesting to say that evokes thought. She always had strong opinions about the readings and wasn't afraid to speak her mind. Well done Lila.

I'm nominating a triplet this week. It goes to Lauren, Sarah and Ryan for being exemplary editors. When we did our ppersuasive essays they were in my editing crew and i thought that they had good comments and ideas about what i wrote and how it was written.

Michelle Russel inspired me this week with the dedication that she demonstrated in her homework. While most people only wrote the bare minimum to slip by, she wrote down several quotes from the American Literature book and discussed them in detail. Good job!

Nathan Potter inspired me this week by going above and beyond expectations. When he discovered his great liking for one of the poems we read in class, 'Bells', he not only looked further into it but started to memorize it, just because he liked it so much. It doesn't take an Italian film director to see Nathan's dedication to good literature. Bravo!

Ryan Howe and Zach Levene inspired me this week, due to how they continually looked up allusions and names. It really helped me to understand the plot. It made me feel guilty that I did not put that extra effort into looking up those people and allusions, Great Work!

Sam inspired me this week because of his possitive attitude. he always had feedback for the essays people read and seemed like he put a lot of effort into his crtiques. he also did a wicked good job reading the raven!

Shannon Peters impressed me this week, During our Moby Dick conversations she always had some interesting insight into the reading. Whenever Shannon has an idea it is clear and conrete and helps makes sense of things. I like the way she thinks. Thanks Shannon.

Someone who has inspired me this week is Zack. There is no doubt that we have heard this KUDO repeatedly during this praise session and i have contemplated an act of boycott just for the sake of diversity but upon giving it further thought, i have found that this would be a crime, due to Zach as an enlightening and indefatigable source of knowledge. Thank you, you charming young scholar.

Zach Levene impressed me this week with his research of Elijah the Prophet and his relation to Ahab from a bibilical sense. His descriptions of these characters allowed the class to draw many parallels between these characters in the story and the Bible.

Zach really impressed me this week. During the large class discussions he always seemed to know the background of the random names that Melville used, and if he didn't already know what they meant he had looked them up. I found myself wondering what these names might have meant as I was reading, but never took the initiative to actually find out. I applaud Zach for his motivation.

Zach went the extra mile and went into the etymological and biblical meaning which were often key to scenes. Liam's essay was great, it was a unique topic, had very good devices and an overall moving tone.