A classic painting from English Romantic artist that has been used for many book covers. Most recently encountered on cover and as guiding metaphor in Gaddis's "The Landscape of History" (very interesting book). Plan to use this first day of class to generate discussion in AP Lit about painting, literature, art, and their lives.
just finished this with AP juniors and Honors Brit Lit Students: great project for poetry reading skills. they wrote an in class explication about their sonnet after. will memorize and recite their sonnet as well next year. They rocked it! we are ready for the Romantics now.
The Birthday Party by Katherine Brush
They were a couple in their late thirties, and they looked unmistakably married. They sat on the banquette opposite us in a little narrow restaurant, having dinner. The man had a round, self-satisfied face, with glasses on it; the woman was fadingly pretty, in a big hat. There was nothing conspicuous about them, nothing particularly noticeable, until the end of their meal, when it suddenly became obvious that this was an occasion-in fact, the husband's birthday. And the wife had planned a little surprise for him.
It arrived, in the form of a small but glossy birthday cake, with one pink candle burning in the center. The headwaiter brought it in and placed it before the husband, and meanwhile the violin-and-piano orchestra played "Happy Birthday to You" and the wife beamed with shy pride over her little surprise, and such few people as there were in the restaurant tried to help out with a pattering of applause. It became clear at once that help was needed, because the husband was not pleased. Instead he was hotly embarrassed, and indignant at his wife for embarrassing him.
You looked at him and you saw this and you thought, "Oh, now don't be like that!" But he was like that, and as soon as the little cake had been deposited on the table, and the orchestra had finished the birthday piece, and the general attention had shifted from the man and the woman, I saw him say something to her under his breath-some punishing thing, quick and curt and unkind. I couldn't bear to look at the woman then, so I stared at my plate and waited for quite a long time. Not long enough, though. She was still crying when I finally glanced over there again. Crying quietly and heartbrokenly and hopelessly, all to herself, under the gay big brim of her best hat.
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aren't suggesting that "hyper-texting" leads to sex, drinking or drugs, but say it's startling to see an apparent link between excessive messaging and that kind of risky behavior
It found that about one in five students were hyper-texters and about one in nine are hyper-networkers — those who spend three or more hours a day on Facebook and other social networking websites.About one in 25 fall into both categories.
Hyper-texting and hyper-networking were more common among girls, minorities, kids whose parents have less education and students from a single-mother household, the study found.
tudy found those who text at least 120 times a day are nearly three-and-a-half times more likely to have had sex than their peers who don't text that much
Talking on the phone just isn't appealing to some teens, said her classmate, Ivanna Storms-Thompson."Your arm gets tired, your ear gets sweaty," said Ivanna, who also doesn't like the awkward silences.