iseroma

Watch Precious Knowledge

Mr. Isero — Mon, 21 May 2012 02:32:56 +0000

Precious Knowledge is worth your time. It’s a one-hour film about the controversy in Arizona schools about whether it’s OK to teach ethnic studies.

Watch it here, for free, until June 7.

If you watch it, leave a comment about what you think.

For news analysis, check out Ill Doctrine

Mr. Isero — Mon, 21 May 2012 01:06:53 +0000

I think you’ll like this guy. Jay Smooth is the host of New York’s longest running hip-hop radio show, Underground Railroad.

He also does a video blog called Ill Doctrine, where he does commentary on current politics and news items.

He’s smart and funny. Here’s an example:

I’ll also add Ill Doctrine over on my blogroll on the right sidebar. What do you think?

Some scenes from the Senior Exhibition

Mr. Isero — Fri, 18 May 2012 06:17:46 +0000

I like my little camera. The sound isn’t great, and the video is shaky, but I like turning it on when nobody is looking and doing some candid camera work.

Here are a few scenes from Wednesday’s Senior Exhibition. Congratulations, seniors.

The Panel at the ASM

Ms. Turner’s Instructions

Lunch!

Antonio and Kevin’s Reflection (sound isn’t great)

The End of the Day (plus Rio)

Your deepest books this year

Mr. Isero — Thu, 17 May 2012 15:41:37 +0000

Your favorite book was a close vote, but Siddhartha definitely won the Deepest Book contest.

Here are the results:

Your favorite books this year

Mr. Isero — Thu, 17 May 2012 15:37:13 +0000

One of the questions on Monday during our reading evaluation was, “What was your favorite book that you read this year?”

It was close. Here are the results!

Our last Forced Fun before the AP Test

Mr. Isero — Mon, 07 May 2012 16:39:23 +0000

It was a poignant Forced Fun last Friday. APers had deep things to say about their growth and their journey in the class. Brenda won the gift, an AP coffee mug. And then Sarai chose Stephanie for Student of the Week.

Take a look at the pictures below!

Marco: The AP. It’s Time.

Marco A. — Mon, 07 May 2012 14:05:11 +0000

The AP Test that we have been preparing for all year is only a couple days away. The whole year we have been writing essays, preparing for multiple choice, and analyzing books in order to get to the heart of the theme. With all of this practice, I know EVERYONE in the class is going to pass.

My own motivator is my confidence. I’ve felt ready to take the exam since September, but that didn’t mean I was going to pass. Now that the test is a few days away, I AM ready, and I KNOW I’m going to pass. I wish everyone else luck on the test, even those students in different high schools.

President Obama took AP English

Mr. Isero — Mon, 07 May 2012 06:38:00 +0000

There’s a new biography coming out about President Barack Obama, and in it, author David Maraniss highlights Obama’s college years at Columbia University in New York City.

Apparently, Mr. Obama knew how to read and write. Here’s a letter he wrote to his girlfriend when he was 20. It’s a response to T.S. Eliot’s poetry.

I haven’t read “The Waste Land” for a year, and I never did bother to check all the footnotes. But I will hazard these statements—Eliot contains the same ecstatic vision which runs from Münzer to Yeats. However, he retains a grounding in the social reality/order of his time. Facing what he perceives as a choice between ecstatic chaos and lifeless mechanistic order, he accedes to maintaining a separation of asexual purity and brutal sexual reality. And he wears a stoical face before this. Read his essay on Tradition and the Individual Talent, as well as Four Quartets, when he’s less concerned with depicting moribund Europe, to catch a sense of what I speak. Remember how I said there’s a certain kind of conservatism which I respect more than bourgeois liberalism—Eliot is of this type. Of course, the dichotomy he maintains is reactionary, but it’s due to a deep fatalism, not ignorance. (Counter him with Yeats or Pound, who, arising from the same milieu, opted to support Hitler and Mussolini.) And this fatalism is born out of the relation between fertility and death, which I touched on in my last letter—life feeds on itself.

(Yes, that’s a love letter.) Um, it’s pretty clear that President Obama took AP English. (No, I don’t really know what he’s talking about.)

Chavonni: AP Test

Chavonni G. — Mon, 07 May 2012 06:00:31 +0000

I am ready for this test. I dint do an essay everyweek to fail. I have can a long way with my writing skills. I looked back on my first essay and My writing has change so much. I am ready for college and I am ready for this test. Now when I write essays, everything comes easy. I know how to do an excellent outline, and I have conqued the obsticle of writing a thesis statement.

I know for a fact that my writing has grown because when I took my English college placement test at San Francisco state it was easy! I understand the complicated questions they give us. I have studies for the multiple choice section and I know way more lit terms than I did at the beginning of the year. My spelling can be a little better but I know how to write in present perfect tense now. At first, I used to always some how slip second person point of view in my essays, now I don’t do that at all. I am going to pass this test!!