Twelfth Grade, Second Reporting Period
May 5 – 30, August 25 – September 19, 2003
English (World Literature) - Heart of Darkness and “The Secret Sharer,” by Joseph Conrad, noting his symbolism, technique of comparison, and use of detail, O’Henry’s “The Hypothesis of Failure,” Melville’s “Bartelby the Scrivener” and a sampling of Billy Budd and Koestler’s Darkness at Noon; wrote two essays and read a Flannery O’Connor excerpt, The Language of the King James Bible, by Gail Riplinger.
History – The American colonial period (Johnson); read weekly news magazine, including reports on situations in Sudan, the Congo, and Mexico; Alexis de Toqueville’s introduction in Democracy in America; and over one-half of Chuck Colson’s testimony of the Watergate scandal (Born Again); attended a meeting where a state government adviser spoke about tort reform.
Advanced Math – Polar coordinates of vectors and complex numbers (from calculus book), exponential functions, graphs of sinusoids, conditional permutations, complex roots and factoring, inverse trigonometric functions, powers of trigonometric functions, and finding equations of perpendicular bisectors (Saxon Advanced Mathematics).
Advanced Chemistry – Molecular-orbital hybridization, and geometry of molecules that have more than eight electrons in the valence shell, phase diagrams of matter, intermolecular forces, kinds of crystalline solids, unit cell configurations, and calculation of molecular size, started reading about solutions and colloids.
Experiment – Shapes of crystals formed from evaporated ammonium-chloride and copper-sulfate solutions.
German – A cursory grammar overview of definite and indefinite articles, plurals, noun cases, prepositions, verb types, and word order.
Violin – Performed Haydn’s Concerto No. 1 (sans cadenza) in a recital, worked on cadenza, did Kruetzer studies and second position exercise, played solos and during worship at church.
Piano – Bach’s Prelude in C and Chopin’s Largo Op. 28, “In Church,” “Battle Hymn,” “Für Elise,” “Maple Leaf Rag,” and Todd Roed’s arrangement of “Over the Rainbow.”
Cooking – Bread-machine-dough pizza, dried-apricot cookies, spaghetti.
P.E. – DDR (Dance Dance Revolution), a game where you use your feet.
Computer – Drew a comic, scanned it in, and added captions with Photoshop. Learned about the SHN (SHorteN) lossless audio compression format, ripped four CD’s, encoded them to SHN, and burned archive copies. Learned about the old SGI (Silicon Graphics Inc.) Indy workstation computer and tried to buy one on eBay. Made an Ellen Feiss web page, which drew 30,000 hits. Wrote a radio drama using a speech synthesizer and Flash. Tried to build an interface with Flash only using sound, but didn’t have a program to generate good enough sounds. Continued developing a Flash web site for the Macromedia Back to School Contest. Installed a picture management program for his web site (Gallery v. 1.3) and managed some pictures with it. Created a new theme for the phpBB (pre-hypertext processor bulletin board) forum program. Started writing a blog program with MySQL and PHP. Switched web hosts and then switched back after the new one turned out to be slow and the previous one had new and better deals. Looked into running Linux on an Xbox.