AF: It's my birthday

It's my birthday, Everybody!  (It was Hayden's yesterday, so happy birthday, Hayden!)  Anyway, I'm 57 today, and I'm leaving in about 2 hours to meet my book club homies in Palm Desert, where we sit around the pool during the coolest part of the day and talk about life and literature.  (The rest of the time, we're in an air-conditioned condo draped over the furniture and sprawled on the floor like Salvidor Dali paintings, talking and noshing.)  I've been reading with these friends since 2002 -- we've read nearly 150 books together.   Maybe more.  We haven't counted them up lately.

Anyway, I have your notebooks, as you probably saw in my earlier post, and today is the last day for the blog.  Our blog closes (temporarily) at midnight tonight.  I will not be paying (much) attention to the blog or to your notebooks until Monday.

I want to publicly discourage any of you from junking up the blog with nonsense.  I mean, a bit of foolishness here and there helps relieve stress, yes.  But a relentless barrage is annoying.

But I've checked all the notebooks in, and compared the notebook list to the blog list.  There are a few discrepancies, and a few people who gave me beautiful notebooks will do all of their blogging today. Don't judge.  Everybody has their story, and it is not up to you to decide what any of this means.  I am working with a few people, trying to get everything figured out.

Our deal is this:  do the work, get a seat in the class.  What happens to someone else has NO bearing on your status.  If you have done the work, I will not drop you even if your work is far below my expectations.  Everybody comes to me with different levels of experience.  Some of you may have written 8-9 essays last year.  Some of you may have written 3-4.  I have no idea.  So again, don't judge.  I am willing to work with anyone who tries hard and does the work required to improve their thinking, their reading, and their writing.

For all I know at this point, some of those notebooks can be incomplete.  I will figure that out on Monday and Tuesday, and give my final list to the counselors on Tuesday or Wednesday.  You will receive a mass email from me when I get the list finalized.  It looks like we'll have about 61 people, split between two classes -- so about half of those who showed up to the summer homework meeting.  This is how it always goes.  Really great people dropped the class for their own reasons, so you also have to avoid thinking that an AP class has all of the elite students.  That is just not true.  There are talented kids who are not taking the class.

Anyway, I gotta go pack my bag.   I invite anyone who has a question to pose it here in the comment section.  If you happen to know the answer to someone's question,  answer them!  I'll be reading you casually in the desert (on my iPad), and will back in my seat and working on Monday.

Finish up your summer homework for your other classes!  And try to have some fun in the waning days of summer vacation.  Go outside and study a bug.  Count clouds, or go stick your feet in the ocean.   Enjoy my birthday!

PS.  Nobody has ever mentioned the xkcd comics in the header.  Why?