December 9

Today, Dr. Preston started off class by talking to us about journals and homework. Dr. Preston recommends that everyone take their journals home over the break, in order to review them (personally, I've found that my journals are a good source of personal statement fodder) and/or write more on the prompts that you feel could be improved. The same goes for our blogs-- if you're missing assignments, or just wanna fix that one post that you totally BS'ed at 2:00 in the morning to get it done (we've all been there), you're more than welcome to improve them over the break and resubmit it to Dr. Preston. After all, the school calendar may be ending, but in Dr. Preston's words, "Your learning calendar never stops."

Then Dr. Preston passed back some graded papers. BTW, if you REALLY want his grading system converted to letter grades, here it is:

✓+ :)	A
✓+	A-
✓ (comment)	B
✓	B or C

After that, Dr. Preston asked for volunteers to bring food for our finals period/party, so if you were absent today and want to bring food, you should send Dr. Preston an email. Same goes if you have specific logistics requirements for your final (ex. fridge for food, room opened early for setup, space to store your baking soda volcano, large amounts of paper towels and/or Windex to clean up mess made by said volcano, etc.) and didn't get a chance to tell Dr. Preston today.

Also, if you're looking for a reason to come to school on Dummy Day, Dr. Preston will be available for individual conferences about grades/English/whatever with anyone who's interested.

Besides our final showcase, we have one more assignment this semester: write a time-capsule email to the future you at futureme.org. Then you'll write a blog post entitled "LIFE AFTER THIS BLOG POST," but don't copy-paste your email to publish on your blog (well, unless you really want to). Instead, write about the *experience* of writing the email to yourself.