Dear Student (parents/guardians):

Teaching English Honors 9 is one of my favorite teaching assignments. Since I do have experience as a middle school teacher, I hope to help you make a smooth transition to high school English. Experience has taught me to aim high with my expectations of you. With this in mind, I expect great things from you. Through hard work and determination, we will work to create a classroom climate that will inspire and challenge each of us. Furthermore, I expect that you and your classmates will find ways to connect personally to the reading and writing assignments while gaining an understanding of the relationship between literature and historical events, ancient philosophies, and cultural movements.

Hopefully, time and a relaxed schedule during the summer will afford you some time to read and prepare for the beginning of your ninth grade year. Enclosed with this letter is “The Summer Reading.” From the list, you will discover that three of the pieces are contemporary and the other is a reference book. You will be required to read two literary works – one of the contemporary and the other, a nonfiction piece. You will be responsible for purchasing the books, accessing them online for free, or downloading them.

If you have any questions, you may contact me at . Since this is my school email address, I do not check it regularly during the summer; however, I will try to check it at least every few weeks. If I do not meet you before, I look forward to meeting you in August. Have a great summer!

Sincerely,

Mrs. Alicia I. Morgret, LDHS English Teacher

P.S. “I do my best work if I think about what it is I have to offer.” – Barbara Kingsolver

English Honors 9

Summer Reading Assignments

Mrs. Morgret

Assignment : Reading and responding

Each student is required to read two books, one from part A andthe part B selection. In class during the first two weeks of school, students will complete two individual critical essays, projects, and/or tests. The essays, projects, and/or testswill be used to evaluate each student’s comprehension of his/her reading. The titles are available at local libraries if you do not wish to purchase them at a book store or through an online site, such as Amazon.com. If anyone has difficulty accessing any book, please email me, Mrs. Morgret – - before July 15. Also, I suggest that you read over the “Good Reads” online summaries of the titles listed below and narrow your choices based on what interests you.

Part A:Contemporary –Pick and read one of the works listed in the following section. Write a one page, double- spaced (10 or 12 point font ) reaction to the selected story; in other words, explain what you enjoyed and/or disliked about it.Include specific excerpts from the literary

piece.

(---Possible :20 points for written reaction ---)

The Five People You Meet in Heaven

byMitch Albom(Goodreads Author)

Eddie is a wounded war veteran, an old man who has lived, in his mind, an uninspired life. His job is fixing rides at a seaside amusement park. On his 83rd birthday, a tragic accident kills him as he tries to save a little girl from a falling cart. He awakes in the afterlife, where he learns that heaven is not a destination, but an answer.
In heaven, five people explain your life to you. Some you knew, others may have been strangers. One by one, from childhood to soldier to old age, Eddie's five people revisit their connections to him on earth, illuminating the mysteries of his "meaningless" life, and revealing the haunting secret behind the eternal question: "Why was I here?"

The Namesake

byJhumpaLahiri

JhumpaLahiri'sInterpreter of Maladiesestablished this young writer as one the most brilliant of her generation. Her stories are one of the very few debut works -- and only a handful of collections -- to have won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction. Among the many other awards and honors it received were the New Yorker Debut of the Year award, the PEN/Hemingway Award, and the highest critical praise for its grace, acuity, and compassion in detailing lives transported from India to America.
InThe Namesake, Lahiri enriches the themes that made her collection an international bestseller: the immigrant experience, the clash of cultures, the conflicts of assimilation, and, most poignantly, the tangled ties between generations. Here again Lahiri displays her deft touch for the perfect detail — the fleeting moment, the turn of phrase — that opens whole worlds of emotion.
The Namesaketakes the Ganguli family from their tradition-bound life in Calcutta through their fraught transformation into Americans. On the heels of their arranged wedding, Ashoke and AshimaGanguli settle together in Cambridge, Massachusetts. An engineer by training, Ashoke adapts far less warily than his wife, who resists all things American and pines for her family. When their son is born, the task of naming him betrays the vexed results of bringing old ways to the new world. Named for a Russian writer by his Indian parents in memory of a catastrophe years before, Gogol Ganguli knows only that he suffers the burden of his heritage as well as his odd, antic name.
Lahiri brings great empathy to Gogol as he stumbles along the first-generation path, strewn with conflicting loyalties, comic detours, and wrenching love affairs. With penetrating insight, she reveals not only the defining power of the names and expectations bestowed upon us by our parents, but also the means by which we slowly, sometimes painfully, come to define ourselves.

This Way for the Gas, Ladies and Gentlemen

byTadeusz Borowski,Barbara Vedder(Editor/Translator),Jan Kott(Introduction),Michael Kandel(Translator)

Tadeusz Borowski's concentration camp stories were based on his own experiences surviving Auschwitz and Dachau. In spare, brutal prose he describes a world where the will to survive overrides compassion and prisoners eat, work and sleep a few yards from where others are murdered; where the difference between human beings is reduced to a second bowl of soup, an extra blanket or the luxury of a pair of shoes with thick soles, and where the line between normality and abnormality vanishes.
Published in Poland after the Second World War, these stories constitute a masterwork of world literature.

Part B:Reference/Nonfiction- Purchase a copy, read free- online, or download Edith Hamilton’s Mythology. This text will be very beneficial to you during the course of the school year in honors. Many of the stories, novels, and plays that we will read have mythological allusions, or references. If you enter the school year with this knowledge, your experience and understanding of the literature will be much easier. I realize that many of you might have prior knowledge of many of the myths, but I encourage you to examine the book and seriously study its contents.

You are only required to read parts one, two, three and five of the book. As you read Mythology, complete the study guide, which is included on these summer reading assignment pages. You will submit it for a grade and you will need it for study. This study packet will be helpful to you during the school year as there will be many references to myths found in the Honors English 9 literature.

Nonfiction Book: Mythology by Edith Hamilton (Completion of study guide - 30 points)

-NEXT PAGE IS STUDY GUIDE FOR MYTHOLOGY-

English Honors 9

Summer Reading Assignments

Mrs. Morgret

Mythology --- Summer Reading -- Study Guide

Name______

The Two Great Gods of Earth

  1. Identify Demeter.

______

  1. Tell the story of Demeter and Persephone in your own words. How does it explain the changing of the seasons?

______

  1. Who is Dionysus?

______

  1. What happens to his mother, Semele, and what does this suggest about the nature of the power of the Greek gods?

______

  1. Some Greeks had trouble accepting Dionysus as a god. Why do you think this might be so?

______

Cupid and Psyche

Explain how Psyche comes to marry Cupid, how she loses him, and how she eventually gets him back. Do you think that Cupid treats Psyche fairly in the course of the story? Explain.

______

Eight Brief Tales of Lovers

1. For each of the following, sum up the story in one or two sentences.

  • Pyramus and Thisbe______
  • Orpheus and Eurydice ______
  • Pygmalion and Galatea ______
  • Baucis and Philemon ______
  • Daphne ______

The Great Heroes Before the Trojan War

  1. Identify each of the following:
  2. Perseus - ______
  3. Medusa - ______
  4. Theseus - ______
  5. The Minotaur - ______
  6. The Labyrinth - ______

The Great Families of Mythology

  1. What happened to Niobe? ______
  2. What riddle did Oedipus solve? Explain how his answer made him king? ______
  3. Why did the Seven against Thebes occur and who died in the battle? ______

********Pledge: I have read the assignment and completed the study guide usingMythology. On my honor, I have neither given nor received aid on this assignment.

Signature: ______Date ______