Survey

Some Haiku

Some haiku I wrote while we were studying poetry.

Steam rising in whisps-
a moments pause before
the football is snapped

An ancient mesa
painted in rosy pastels-
The magic hour!

Ten thousand pairs of
running shoes - but only
a single winner

Gibbous moon above;
coyote scurries across
the deserted street

New School Year

The 2009-2010 school year is fast approaching!

College Prep. 10
Technical Writing
American Literature
Comp. II

Wow! A variety of classes...

In addition there are a large number of extracurricular projects on my plate.

The Cinema Club goals:
-produce 5-10 short films
-produce a film longer than 5 minutes
-produce 5-10 commercials for school events/clubs
-coordinate with On Assignment to produce regular news content

On Assignment goals
This is a broadcast collaboration between the Cinema Club and The Broadcaster(the school newspaper) to produce regular video segments.
-produce a news segment on a school sporting event
-produce a news segment on each school sport (in its season)
-produce a news segment on a music department event
-produce a news segment on an art department event
-produce a news segment on each of the drama productions(fall play, spring play, spring musical)
-produce a "hard" news segment
-grow the On Assignment staff (we had only 3 last year)

HEA Scholarship Play: Horror on Homestead!
-Thirty years of Hershey staff raising money for multiple scholarships...

TKAM 8-11

Today the CP10 students are taking a blockbuster quiz on chapters 8 through 11 of To Kill a Mockingbird. This is the end of "Part One" of the novel and covers such diverse events as: a house fire, a horrible Christmas for Scout, a rabid dog, and a crazy morphine addict.

Comp II is working on review for the chapter test on "Parts of the Sentence" (Direct Objects, Indirect Objects, Objective Comp., Predicate Adjectives, Predicate Nominative).

Technical writing is continuing to work on the Lab Report project. They are writing up their results using a lab format used by the University of Toronto and the University of Minnesota.

Tower of Power

The spring Technical Writing class completed the performance part of the "Tower of Power" lab report.

The requirements were deceptively simple. 1 sheet of computer paper. Glue stick. Make a tower at least 8cm tall and hold as much mass as possible.

The record is 101lbs! As a class the spring group did a great job. All but one group had at least one tower hold 50lbs or more. Tyler and Megan had the high scoring tower with 75lbs. Way to go!

Now it's on to writing up the lab report. How did you build the towers(some built as many as a dozen to perfect their design)? How did the tower fail? Why did you change your design? What implications for the future does this have?

Soon we'll start work on the Professional Presentation project.

Future Projects for Cinema Club

We are currently editing an Equality Day video for the GSA Club(Gay-Straight Alliance).

Mr. Gustantino has asked us to create a commercial for the new school store. This is in the planning phase right now.

An additional project is the radio drama. I've adapted Lord Dunsany's short story "Two Bottles of Relish" for radio and updated the setting to modern day New York City. We hope to record this drama sometime this month. I have several radio drama scripts ready to go based on Ernest Hemmingway short stories("A Way You'll Never Be" and "The Killers").

In collaboration with several students from the school newspaper The Broadcaster I filmed several interviews at our school's 4-Diamond's Fund Dance Marathon. We hope to use this footage both to create a brief news story and for later use as an instructional tool with the journalism students. Eventually we'd like to have integrated collaboration with the Cinema Club and The Broadcaster. The journalism students would be the "on camera" talent and the Cinema Club would provide the technical side(filming, editing, post production).

Cinema Club

We've completed the festival season here at HHS. The club entered two films into the festival and our members submitted two additional films. While we didn't win any awards we did learn a great deal about making movies.