Twelfth Grade, Sixth Reporting Period
March 29 – May 21, 2004
English - Read The Hunchback of Notre Dame (unabridged), wrote an essay on Animal Farm, and worked on a fan-club newsletter.
World History – Read in Freedom at Midnight, by Lapierre and Collins, and Modern Times, by Paul Johnson, about India after 1947. Kept up with current events, various social issues, technology, and business by reading World news magazine, Wired magazine, and The Wall Street Journal (daily) and listening to talk radio, and gathered with city officials and others in observance of the annual National Day of Prayer.
Advanced Math – Converting vectors in rectangular form to polar coordinates, writing complex numbers in polar form, linear absolute-value inequalities, graphs of absolute-value functions, locus of a line and circle, distance from a point to a line, graphing parabolas. Modular arithmetic, number theory, monoalphabetic substitutions of increasing complexity, and polyalphabetic substitutions (Sinkov).
German – Finished third-year-level tapes and read some of Thomas Mann’s “Tristan” in German.
Computer – Worked on a Java compression program, learned how Firefox works, learned Python and wrote a few programs in Python, tried to get Morphix to install on the hard drive of his second computer (instead of being a live operating system) but the beta-nature of the installer prevented it, installed Gentoo Linux, then installed Smoothwall and configured Smoothwall to be a dedicated firewall.
Violin – Scored an “Excellent” rating for his performance of Veracini’s Sonata No. 8 in B-flat, 4th movement, for the UTA String Solo/Ensemble Festival; is working on Bach Concerto No. 2 in E Major, Fiorillo studies, three-octave arpeggios; played in The Lord’s Strings orchestra concert, and attended a New Philharmonic Orchestra of Irving performance.
Piano – Memorizing Chopin’s Prelude Op. 28, No. 20, and working on Chopin’s Etude Op. 10, No. 12.
P.E. (DDR) – Passed “Maxx Unlimited” on standard mode.
Bible – Galatians 2:20b-21, Psalm 125:3-5.
Miscellaneous - Made pretzels, fixed the riding-lawn-mower engine.