February 23 Minutes

Today in class the final people who needed to get their topic for the research paper approved did so. Afterward, Mr. Lazarow made a few announcements:
1) Watchmen (the movie) will be debuting in theaters next Friday, March 6th. We have until the end of the 3rd marking period to read the book, see the movie and write a paper for extra credit. Mr. Lazarow will also be hosting a seminar on Watchmen after school at a date to be announced later.
2) HSPA testing will begin next week on Tuesday-Thursday. Don't stress about the testing about the testing it is simply a standardized test that is only needed to pass high school and then the scores are thrown away. Thus colleges will never see the scores. However be warned, don't take the test too lightly and screw around. Mr. Lazarow has had good students in the past mess around and perform poorly and suffer the embarassment of having to take HSPA remedial classes in their senior year for no credit.
3) Start making friends with the school and local librarians because they will become excellent resources as we search for research for our term papers. Librarians are very adept at finding information and are very helpful.

Finally for the last 20 minutes of class we discussed Thomas Jefferson's Declaration of Independence. While many Americans simply take it as it is, the work is actually a great piece of propaganda. Some of the major points we discussed:
-All faults were blamed on King George even though he did not have much to do with the governing of the colonies.
-Some of the grievances were either blown way out of proportion or written so that it would be difficult to research the true facts.
-In those days it was much more difficult to research information and thus most of Jefferson's points were never contradicted.

-Tyler Harris