20 Outstanding SAT Essays

The College Board is offering a free copy of 20 Outstanding SAT Essays. Their blurb is:

This free publication, featuring reproductions of original handwritten essays along with commentary and an index, will help teach students to write effectively for the SAT and beyond.

Hello people

Well hello esteemed colleagues. I hope you are enjoying your January (yes, I'm serious). Just dropping a line to say hi. Joel I'm going to check out some of the websites you mentioned as they sound interesting.

American Rhetoric

I found this site today that might benefit some of you. It's the American Rhetoric Top 100 site. It not only has the text of the speeches, but also a downloadable .mp3 version of most.

One last update...

So, I enjoyed the website I mentioned, figurospeech, so much that I went out and bought the writer's book. It's called Thank You For Arguing: What Aristotle, Lincoln, and Homer Simpson Can Teach Us About the Art of Persuasion. I started reading it last night, and I have to tell you it is highly readable and brings in some of the concepts of AP Language. It does take the whole rhetoric idea to an extreme that I don't think our kids will have to know, though so far in my reading it seems very promising in terms of helping kids understand arguments.

I've enjoyed it a lot and would love to have a copy for our English department library as well...we do have one of those don't we?

Sorry I've monopolized the blog...

The Big Read

Yesterday at the Inter-High Student Council meeting, Laurie Torrell from the Just Buffalo Literary Center spoke with us about The Big Read. The Big Read is a program promoting reading that is supported by the NEA. The book for the month of February is To Kill A Mockingbird. Ms. Torrell said that they had roughly 2000 books to give away for it, though about 1500 had been spoken for. If anyone is interested, there are (hopefully) 500 copies of the book, a print reader's guide, and an audio guide. So if you are interested and act fast you may be able to participate in this year's program.

Any further information you might need would be available on the Just Buffalo website. Pretty easy to find, but here's a link.

An interesting website...

that you might want to check out is one I stumbled upon yesterday. And in an attempt to be blogbetter (or rather, because I was told to do so...ahem) here is a link: figarospeech.

It's pretty interesting, funny, and should be helpful to anyone in the AP Language and Composition curriculum.

Rhetoric Rhocks!!

:)