If you are looking for the page on summer work for 2008, please go back to my homepage for this link. 

This course focuses on advanced reading, writing, thinking, talking, and creating. We’ll look closely at world literature for the purpose of extrapolating ideas and creating individual arguments.

Starting with Huck Finn and The Kite Runner from your summer reading, we begin our existential philosophy journey and continue the year with rhetorical analysis exploration. Content has a "classics" focus, including American and English writers. There is little room for creative writing. The class looks at poetry, expository writing, rhetorical analysis, short stories, lots of books and lots of writing.

One of the major purposes for this class is to help prepare you for an AP or IB course and the rigors and joys that will come through the knowledge that you gain.

We’ll be writing at least four research papers together.

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%
Homework grade 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 courtesy.

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