Twelfth Grade, First Reporting Period
English
World Literature: Finished reading The Laird’s Inheritance, by George MacDonald, memorized Matthew 5:3-7, read a semi-sanitized The 5-Minute Iliad and Other Instant Classics, by Greg Nagan, especially Kafka’s “Metamorphosis,” “A Christmas Carol,” and “Sense and Sensibility;” wrote and uploaded a resumé to website
Grammar: Practice with infinitives, gerunds, and participles, parallelism of verbal phrases in a series
Latin – Simple translations into English or Latin, Latin derivatives of English words, declensions and conjugations, Latin history.
World History – WWI aftermath, the Depression, Fascist movements, and WWII (Historical Atlas), read a biography of Dietrich Bonhoeffer, read World magazine weekly, read a Time magazine article the U.S in Iraq, heard a Dallas county court judge explain the Texas court system, read about American colonization (Paul Johnson).
Pre-Calculus - Deductive reasoning, radians, functional notation, domain and range, unit circle, graphing sinusoids, relationship between angles and sides in three similar right triangles in one, functions of negative angles, factoring over the set of complex numbers, graphing quadratic functions (parabolas), knowing the zeroes and y-intercept, trigonometric identities, complementary-angle functions (cofunctions), abstract word problems (Saxon Calculus).
Advanced Chemistry – Calculated change in enthalpy, percent yield in a multiple reaction process, and the energy of an electron. Calculated the energy released or absorbed in changing orbits and color of light released in the Bohr model of an atom. Quantum mechanical model and quantum numbers, electronic structure of molecules (hybrid orbitals) (Apologia).
Ham Radio - Passed the written section for the Technician-Plus license, attended a Society of Broadcast Engineers (SBE) meeting and was given a tour of a state-of-the-art radio station.
Computer Science – Installed and configured a new window manager and got SSH (Secure SHell) and TightVNC (Virtual Network Computing) going from Windows (client) to Linux (server). Made a pop-up window that displays links to various Internet media and a JavaScript program to create pre-made e-mails. Wrote a C++ program to reduce Project Gutenberg text files (stripped the headers off) and started design of a C++ program to do basic artificial language processing. Wrote several more C++ programs for his C++ class (taught by Dan Harlin) that had to do with random numbers, classes, and memory locations.
Violin – Played Haydn’s Concerto No. 1 in C major at UTA’s String Festival, played for church weekly, monthly homeschool recitals, and end-of-semester orchestra concert.
Bowling - Improved score to 146.
Cooking – Cranberry bread in a bread machine, pepper steak, peppery shredded beef in the crock pot for fajitas, pumpkin pies (in prepared crust), spaghetti with homemade meat sauce; yeast rolls from frozen, shaped dough; dairy-case cookies, cleaned strawberries.
Took a week off for Easter.