Obviously, when I said "mid to late July" I meant August 2.  I will see you all in the not to distant future.  If you are in Honors English and want to get a head start, Fahrenheit 451 will be our first read of the year and will have a two week turnaround (approximately) from day one of class to test day.  We will talk more about it and look at some examples of questions but do not read just for plot.

In this class, you need to be a scuba diver, not a water skier.  A scuba diver values depth and observation, and takes the time to look around.  The solitude allows the diver to think about their surroundings while the fact that they are strapped to a tank that allows them to breathe and stay alive forces them to confront their own mortality.  The goggles allow them to see things clearly, acting as a conductor between their own eyes/brains and the undersea world around them.  Due to the nature of nature, a diver could spend an entire dive slowly turning in one spot and they still would not see even a fraction of what is going on around them, but they will see a lot.  Skiing is fun.  You get to whip along the surface of the water, covering more distance in one pass than a scuba diver will likely cover in an entire lifetime of dives.  However, the only things you can see are the things on and around the surface of the water.  The speed and the fact that you are above the water distorts and leaves the skier ignorant of anything that is going on in the depths below them.

Fill up your air tanks and tighten up your goggles.