Do not read "The Lady of Shalott" !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

One of the joys of Daniel's summer vacation is the opportunity he has to take classes online in SUMMER SCHOOL! He absolutely loves it! And by "absolutely loves" I mean "painfully dreads and loathes." Same thing! I have the honor of tutoring him. It's actually not too bad. Well, sort of.

He's taking Biology and English, and while I am about to become an English teacher myself (after my student teaching this fall), I know very close to nothing about biology. I think I took a semester of it in college, but it was at 8:00. I couldn't stay awake for more than 15 minutes of it. Sarah said she came with me one time, and I slept through the entire thing. Then since the same lecture was given at 9:00, we just stayed for the next class. Um, I don't remember that.

So now I am tutoring Daniel in Biology. The class is organized pretty terribly, and the websites the teacher gives us to teach ourselves about meiosis, mitosis, alleles, and chromosomes, were apparently written for PhD Biologists, not struggling high school students. But after finding some used Bio textbooks at the library bookstore, we're doing just fine.

English is pretty cool. We just did a unit on Alfred, Lord Tennyson. As part of his assignment, Daniel was to read a poem and give a recommendation to either read or not read it. His critique follows:

Do not read "The Lady of Shalott" !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! (unless you like to read short novels about an old lady riding down a river on a boat). This is not even a poem. Poems are not short stories that are like five pages long. Poems are supposed to be short and to the point. This is not short or to the point. So I do not recommend this unless you already read it and didn't see this beforehand or because you don't care that it is long.
This poem is very boring. But it is very descriptive. Tennyson describes a lot of the scenery on which the Lady of Shalott is floating. It talks a lot about Shalott and Camelot, which rhyme. Every line rhymes. Why would you sit around and figure out words that rhyme all day? And this is like 7 pages long. That's like 50 rhymes!

Thank you, Daniel! If it were up to him, we wouldn't have any poems longer than "Crossing the Bar." But that one was "so boring" he didn't even want to write a critique of it. Ha ha ha! I have a great summer job!