Week of September 14

After some problems with the Virtual School on Sunday, our technicians have everything up and running. All due dates and deadlines were adjusted accordingly. Most of the kids seemed to handle it in stride.

The Govenrment and Politics class finished up the Judicial Branch this week. The kids got to know the justices better after watching two online interviews with Antonin Scalia and Clarence Thomas. Ask them what they thought of these two men- it provoves a wide variety of responses. The first paper was assigned yesterday and is due on October 1st. I am stressing that they need to work over time rather than try to cram it in to the last minute. The assignment must be uploaded to the Virtual School by midnight that night so no 3AM scrambling.

The United States History classses continued to watch the John Adams mini-series to see how the politics of early America played out. Students have a variety of nightly assignments that are suppsoed to review major concepts and preprare them with the background for the video segment each day. I have seen a great deal of neglect in the nightly assignments (only 2-3 students had yesterday's homework complete) with the thought that we are "just watching the movie". I have emphasized that these assignments are designed to highlight major events in the movie which is used in lieu of class lecture. If you see a lull in homework, please reinforce that it needs to be done nightly.