Gym Class!

As I already informed the Fabulous Vicky, I caught the football twice today (*victory boogie*). I also wore no shoes the entire gym period. The teacher, who is the football coach at school, spends the entire period on his cell phone, so most of the kids in the class dump their shoes on the track and enjoy the squishiness of shredded tires between their toes. Kathrya caught the ball, too. I will sometimes swear when the ball comes towards me. She, however, released an extremely annoyed "you have got to be kidding me." She then proceeded to catch the ball, and even remembered to run. Yay Kathrya! The only other occurrence during gym today was that while I was totally looking where I was going and being a good little football drone, Peter, who was going in entirely the wrong direction, ran headlong into me. It hurt. I'm still a bit annoyed with him about this, but I suppose I'll get over it. Eventually. Maybe.

Again, I'm working on my portfolio, and really don't have anything long and drawn out in me. I did, however, manage to locate some Spanish homework from last year. It isn't as exciting as Harry Potter, but it'll do. By the way- most of my grammatical errors are kept intact.

In 2005, I went to Italia. First, I went to Piza. I saw the inclined tower of Piza. I tried but was unable to go within the tower because it could fall. I took photos of my sisters in front of the tower. Later, my family and I went to a restaurant and we ate pizza. It was delicious, but I like more the pizza of Westport.

Later, we went to the house of my uncles, near Florence. I spoke little Italiano, but I understood more because Italiano is similar to Español. We went to a parade of Easter. There was a Jesus and many youths were apostles. In Italy, they celebrated all of the Easters with a parade. It is a very interesting tradition. My family and I went to Lucca. We saw the Cathedral of San Martino. It was old and big. The Pope Alexandro II made the cathedral in the year 1003. There was a very big wall outside of the city. We rode bicycles and strolled with bicycle on top of the wall. It was very fun.

The last week, i went to Rome. I saw the Vatican. The Vatican is wear the Pope lives. I had to wait for two hours before I went inside of. When I arrived, I heard the pope, but I did not understand him because he spoke Latin. The church was very pretty, and it pleased me a lot. Then, I went to the hotel, and in the morning I left from Rome and returned to Connecticut.

The End.

And, just to be annoying and pile MORE old, boring schoolwork on you (at least I don't have to read it!) Here's my English recruiting letter. Boy, do I make the class sound like fun.

Welcome to English 9H! That is an example of a boring and unoriginal leading sentence. Which, had I not put this off until the night before, would not exist. If I had started this letter in advanced, my sentence would read more like “Your path through English 9H will be a rocky one, but the difficult journey will be well worth it when you reach the finish line.” Well, maybe not, that has too many clichés. A word of advice for English 9H- avoid the clichés. This teacher can’t stand them. And putting papers off until the last minute, well, I’d avoid that too. If you like to knock out the whole paper in one go, go right ahead, but do so a few days in advanced. Editing and revising does wonders. That’s why grades go up with second drafts.

And another bit of info- try to avoid over-stressing about the grade. As your writing improves (and with the number of papers you’ll write, it will), your grade will go up. The first few quarters it’s a lot of work, but after that I was mostly adjusted. By the end, some of the papers were even fun. I realize that grades are important, but I’d say the writing improvement is worth a couple of Bs (which are a perfectly good grade anyways). I haven’t received any grades this year lower than that of my first reading quiz. I’ve had a few equal to it, but none lower. I think. I’ll have to ask my friend, who keeps track better than I do.

That’s another tip; work with your friends. (I apologize for any unintentional improper semicolon use). Having someone else proofread your papers can be a lifesaver. And we have a lot of readings. A friend who complains about a reading you didn’t do functions as an amazing alarm clock. Just talking to people about English class can help a lot.

My last tip- and this one is going to be in all capitols, because it is both obvious and important- DO THE READINGS. Sorry, just had to get that out there. We don’t read things for no reason. Either they help with the books, the essays, the quizzes (hint, hint), or just class discussions. I talked to someone in the class (and I won’t name names) in around February who informed me that he/she (and I don’t mean he/she is a he-she, its subject-verb agreement) had read only two of the books. He/she was not having a great time in the class, mostly because they didn’t understand what was going on (shocker). Anyways, we read something like fifteen pages per school night (only not that continuously, and mostly on weekends), so keeping up would be a good idea.

So, basically, (this is getting more unprofessional by the whatever-the-heck-so-and-basically-are) English 9H is hard work, but writing everything gets better as the year goes on, (we just read Shakespeare and wrote some fiction stuff. Yay!), and, um, work hard and stuff, but English is pretty awesome, and it was usually a bright part of my day (except when it wasn’t, like when we had a reading quiz), but overall my writing got better and it was fun. So, while I know The Odyssey looks scary, take a deep breath, and remember that things will get better. Although thing is a nonspecific word, which I should not be using. But that is beside the point. Welcome to English 9H!