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Robert Pinsky, former US Poet Laureate, argues that it's a good thing that poetry is challenging :

Difficulty, after all, is one of life's essential pleasures: music, athletics, dance thrill us partly because they engage great difficulties. Epics and tragedies, no less than action movies and mysteries, portray an individual's struggle with some great difficulty. In his difficult and entertaining work Ulysses, James Joyce recounts the challenges engaged by the persistent, thwarted hero Leopold and the ambitious, narcissistic hero Stephen. Golf and video games, for certain demographic categories, provide inexhaustible, readily available sources of difficulty.

 

In the next three weeks, these will be the key pieces of information for review/work on the AP test:

This link (PDF, give it a moment to load) contains the sample responses to the Lear prompt from the College Board. I suspect that you will be unimpressed. Lots of OJ, personal examples, and terrible transitions.

 Yikes.

You should probably join the class NCAA bracket competition.  You need to go here:

http://games.espn.go.com/tcmen/group?groupID=50420&password=fireamaker

 

“The books that help you most are those which make you think the most. The hardest way of learning is that of easy reading, but a great book that comes from a great thinker is a ship of thought, deep freighted with truth and beauty.” –Pablo Neruda


 "Terror is as much a part of the concept of truth as runniness is of the concept of jam. We wouldn’t like jam if it didn’t, by its very nature, ooze. We wouldn’t like truth if it wasn’t sticky, if, from time to time, it didn’t ooze blood." — Jean Baudrillard