Welcome! Glad you are here with us this year.

English 10 focuses on reading, thinking, talking, creating and making you the best writer you can be.

Starting with a philosophy unit on existentialism, we'll be reading J.D. Salinger's The Catcher in the Rye and Khaled Hosseini's The Kite Runner the first few weeks of school.  From there, we go on to Shakespeare's Macbeth and poetry by Edna St. Vincent Millay, Emily Dickinson, and Sylvia Plath. And that's just first semester...

We’ll be writing at least two research papers together, focusing on the process as well as the end product.

You will have many opportunities to demonstrate that you understand the material we cover in class. You will complete various assignments and projects to reflect your understanding of the literature that we read. Each assignment will be worth 100 points. The following is an approximate scheme of how your grade will be determined.

Essays & Literary Analysis 40%
Quizzes and Tests 20%
Vocabulary 20%
*Class Participation 20%

1.) In on due date: full credit
2.) Not in on due date (meaning at the start of the class, printed out. Papers are NOT to be printed in my room and picked up. Come prepared or they are late): 20% off
3.) One week late: 50% off
4.) Two weeks late: no credit

You may e-mail me at mpierce@msad71.net or call me at 985-1110 ext. 465. I’m here to help, but please make an appointment.  Please do not drop by unannounced while I am teaching. Thanks for this courte

Academic Honesty

This applies to both written work and oral presentations.

Plagiarism

• Submitting or presenting another person’s work as your own without proper documentation, including downloaded information from the Internet and lab data.

                    • Using another student’s material without prior approval.

Cheating:

• Giving or receiving information during a test, quiz, and/or class work assignment without teacher authorization.

• Using hand signals, gestures, and the like during tests or quizzes to obtain/give information.

• Using unauthorized materials during a test or quiz.

If found to be academically dishonest, you will receive a zero for the grade and may be reported to administration on the first offense.

Kennebunk High School subscribes to TURNITIN.COM to help with the prevention of academic dishonesty. Also, the submission of papers to this site helps YOU (the writer) get better at writing and citing.

Yes, we’ll be writing lots of ‘em this year. ALL papers are to have a rough, annotated (HAND edited) draft that accompanies the final draft unless otherwise stated. Some papers will have lots of comments from me while others will have a simple rubric scoring. Ask questions!

Grammar scores on rubrics go way down when any of the following are present:

• fragment

• fused or run-on sentence

• comma splice

• verb error

• subject/verb agreement error

• three different misspelled words

• three of the following minor errors:

- incorrect punctuation

- pronoun/antecedent disagreement

- misuse of pronouns

- incorrect plural and possessive forms