James Joyce on the Universe
“His soul swooned slowly as he heard the snow falling faintly through the universe and faintly falling, like the descent of their last end, upon all the living and the dead.” –James Joyce, The Dead
Henry David Thoreau, in Walden:
Let us settle ourselves, and work and wedge our feet downward through the mud and slush of opinion, and prejudice, and tradition, and delusion, and appearance, that alluvion which covers the globe, through Paris and London, through New York and Boston and Concord, through church and state, through poetry and philosophy and religion, till we come to a hard bottom and rocks in place, which we can call reality, and say, This is, and no mistake.
Writing about the home run ball in Ted Williams’s last at-bat at Fenway Park, John Updike wrote:
It was in the books while it was still in the sky.
(from Stanley Fish’s How to Write a Sentence and How to Read One)
AP Language is open to all juniors and seniors at Helena High School. It does receive credit for English for juniors and may be taken for elective credit by seniors. It also prepares students for the AP Language and Composition exam, which offers college credit for passing students.
The course will be focused on the study of argumentation, rhetoric, and analysis. We’ll spend a great deal of our time analyzing and evaluating interesting non-fiction, though the course will also cover the occasional fiction piece. We will certainly read The Grapes of Wrath and The Great Gatsby. This will be a very different experience from your normal English class.
Welcome to My Site
Welcome to Mr. Pogreba’s classroom home page. I have been teaching at Helena High in Montana for the past ten years, and this site contains resources for many o
f the classes I have had the opportunity to teach. Feel free to look around the site and download or share anything you find useful.