Twelfth Grade, First Reporting Period
March 3 – April 30, 2003
 
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.



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.



Twelfth Grade, Third Reporting Period
September 23 – December 4, 2003
 
English (World Literature) – Read part of C.H. Lewis’s Mere Christianity, all of Richter’s The Light in the Forest, Corrie Ten Boom’s The Hiding Place, and Orczy’s The Scarlet Pimpernel, part of The Ugly American, by Lederer and Burdick, all of 2001: A Space Odyssey, by Stanley Kubrick, and listened to Sense and Sensibility.
 
History – Finished Colson’s Born Again; read Book I of Neil Sheehan’s A Bright Shining Lie: John Paul Vann and America in Vietnam, World weekly news magazine, Part I plus of Collins and Lapierre’s O Jerusalem!, and one-third of Under the Influence: How Christianity Transformed Civilization, by Schmidt; heard a DART official and area city planners speak at two local political meetings.
 
Advanced Math – Common and natural logarithms, trigonometric equations, angular velocity, graphing parabolic equations by completing the square to find the axis of symmetry and vertex, circular and distinguishable permutations, factoring over the complex numbers.
 
Advanced Chemistry – Concentration of molarity (M), molality (m), and mole fraction (X), distillation, chromatography and van der Waals forces, colloids, equilibrium constant and Gibb’s free energy equation, solubility product.
Experiments – Saturated solutions of sodium sulfate and temperature, colloidal particles
 
German – Acquired an additional 400 words of vocabulary and the ability to understand moderately complex sentence structure by listening to Learnables Book 3 tapes of Lessons 21-30 and got further experience with grammatical constructions by reading a text and listening to tapes of Lessons 21-23, read in German New Testament.  
 
Violin – Paganini Sonata No. 12, Haydn’s Concerto No. 1, played during worship at church.
 
Piano – “Maple Leaf Rag,” “It Came Upon a Midnight Clear” arrangement, accompaniment to Mozart’s Rondo in D for the violin, Grieg’s Concerto Op. 16 Themes.
 
Cooking – Pizza, lasagna, chicken pot pie (from canned chicken and frozen vegetables), easy spaghetti, crescent-roll braid around a filling, Thanksgiving turkey and dressing, and cranberry fruit salad.
 
P.E. – DDR (Dance Dance Revolution).
 
Bible - II Peter 1:4 and promises Proverb 4:13, Romans 12:3b, Psalm 33:18; “5-5-5” (fifth chapters) of Romans, II Corinthians, and Ephesians.
 
Computer – Completed a Flash applet and created associated HTML files for his web site and submitted his site into the Macromedia Back-to-School Contest.  Made an SQL database-driven PHP program for his father that displayed all of the benchmarks he found in a table with sortable columns and created another program that allowed additions to the benchmark database. Continued working on a blogging program.  Installed the binary distribution of the GCC 3.0.3 on his Linux-running Playstation 2.  Worked on getting a number of other programs to compile, install, and run; compiled and installed a few and ran one.  Just before installing Sony’s v. 2.4 distribution kernel, he was informed through the Playstation Linux Forum that that particular kernel was for game developers only and would make the normal Linux PS2 break, so he changed the /usr/src/linux link to point back to the 2.2 kernel.  Bought an ethernet modem on eBay.  Read Linux From Scratch, Learning Wireless Java, and part of an SQL book.
 



Twelfth Grade, Fourth Reporting Period
December 5, 2003 - February 6, 2004
 
English (World Literature) – Read The Daughter of Time (a detective story into the past surrounding Richard III) , by Josephine Tey, Animal Farm, and Comedy of Errors, is reading The Last of the Mohicans, wrote an article and a radio drama script.
 
World History – Read World weekly news magazine, finished reading about the Colonial Period (Johnson), heard Dallas County officials speaking at two local political meetings.
 
Advanced Math – Calculated the areas of triangles, sectors, and segments; graphed sinusoids of different phase shifts and periods.
 
Introduction to Discrete Math - algorithms, big O functions, logic tables.
 
Statistics -  Represented single-variable data with stem-and-leaf displays, histograms, ogives (with and without probability paper), box-and-whisker displays; determined central tendencies (mean, median, mode, midrange, midquartile), standard deviation, quartiles, percentiles, and z-scores of samples; used the Chebychev theorem and empirical rule to construct normal distributions; determined lines of best fit for bivariate data by the method of least squares.
 
Advanced Chemistry – Common ion effect, precipitation from solution, rules of solubility in water, radioactive decay, radioactive dating, fission, fusion.
 
German – Continued listening and talking along with tapes.
 
Violin – Bach Concerto in E, Fiorillo studies, 3-octave scales, played as accompanist and soloist during worship at church.
 
Piano – Sonatina #3 in A Minor by Benda, “Lustig and Traurig,” by Beethoven, Two-Part Invention #8 (Bach).
 
Cooking – Hamburgers on a George Foreman grill, Christmas cookies, pepper steak in the wok, sweet and sour chicken in the wok, sweet potatoes.
 
P.E. – DDR (Dance Dance Revolution).
 
Computer – Reinstalled Linux on his Playstation 2, patched the ethernet driver, got it on the internet, and installed Mozilla Firebird 0.7 and GCC 3.0.3. Learned Java and started writing programs. Experimented with a “live” version of Linux (boots from the CD), created a boot disk to boot the CD drive, and experimented with a floppy-sized distribution of Linux. Made a radio drama using Dectalk, fixed a router, continued working on a blog program.  Installed Mozilla Firebird 0.7 and Thunderbird 0.4 on the Dell computer and configured them.
 
Bible - I John 1:4, 7; John 10:10b-11a.
 
Took three weeks off for Christmas holiday and a day to go to the Fort Worth Fat Stock Show.



Twelfth Grade, Fifth Reporting Period
February 9 – March 25, 2004
 
English
World Literature:  Finished reading The Last of the Mohicans, read George Herbert’s “Sacrifice,” a sample of Conrad’s Lord Jim, Theodore Dreiser’s “The Second Choice, Edna St. Vincent Millay’s “Justice in Massachusetts” and “Passer Mortuus Est.”
Writing:  Turned five original radio dramas into scripts, wrote two more dramas.
 
World History – Read about America from the Revolutionary War through 1815 (Johnson).  Started reading Freedom at Midnight, by Lapierre and Collins, about India after 1947.  Kept up with current events, such as the Iraq War and Putin’s reelection, by reading World news magazine and listening to talk radio.
 
Advanced Math
Statistics: Linear regression by method of least squares,  equation of line of best fit, estimated line of best fit, probability of events, sample spaces, rules of probability .  
Fourier Series: Angular velocity, wave addition, fundamental frequencies, Fourier series formula, areas of simple waves, multiplying two waves, finding Fourier coefficients, integration terminology, Fourier coefficients formulas, discrete Fourier expansion, spectrum of vowels, logarithmic graph to show symmetry of vowels, differentiation.
 
Theoretical Science – Lorentz attractor, chaos, bifurcation diagrams, fractals, Koch curve, Mandelbrot set from Chaos: Making a New Science, by James Gleick.  Infinitesimals, fractal dimension, Feigenbaum constant, non-linear dynamics, and Julia sets, in Introducing Fractal Geometry, by Lesmoir-Gordon, Rood, and Edney.  Attended a Society of Broadcast Engineers meeting whose program was digital video and HDTV.
 
German – Continued listening and talking with tapes, learned some German songs, read in the German Bible.
 
Computer - Fixed a bug in a Flash applet on his website, set up hotlinking protection on his website, created two new search plugins for Mozilla Firebird/Firefox and sent them to the Mozilla plugin site, successfully ran the JSP "hello world" program, worked on a Java program that included a window done with Swing, improved his XML knowledge, learned XSL, created a webpage about Dance Dance Revolution.
 
Violin – Played “The Lord’s Prayer,” by Malotte, for church and  Haydn’s Concerto No. 1 in C for a talent show, learned Veracini Sonata No. 8 in B-flat, 4th movement.
 
Piano – Bach’s Two-Part Invention No. 8; Chopin’s Prelude Op. 28, No. 20, and Etude Op. 10, No. 12; scales, exercises, and theory.
 
Mending – Used sewing machine to hem, gather, and make a dart; mended a ripped cushion, hemmed by hand.
 
P.E. [DDR (Dance Dance Revolution)] – Has the steps down for Max 300.
 
 
 



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.


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