We continued with the Chapter Three Review in the text.

We watched the second episode of the "Connections" series titled "Death in the Morning." This episode began with a touchstone with which one could ascertain the purity of gold. This led to the use of coinage as a medium of exchange and the math of money. It explored how the triangular "lateen" sail and stern-post rudder expanded seaborne transportation and trade. It finally showed how the study of clouds in the 1700's led to the development of the nuclear bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945.

Read/discuss Act 3, scene 2

Today we covered the play within the play. Will continues to have trouble "translating" on his own, which will be incorporated more and more into the class as we go along. He needs to work on developing his ideas more and has a tendency to fall back on "I don't know" a bit too easily.

We reviewed yesterday's work with lines in the XY plane and the slope-intecept form of a linear equation. Then we went through an example problem on the whiteboard on which we used the y-intercept to plot one point on the graph and then used the slope and that point to give us a second point, thus giving us the line. Will worked several tutor-generated problems on graph paper. Then we commenced a review of Chapter 4.

Today we completed discussion of Chapter 3, addressing the witch hunt phenomenon in New England in the seventeenth century, the Great Awakening and the attendant evangelism in the eighteenth century, the countervailing force of Enlightenment ideas during the same era, the growth of colonial education and literacy (with almanacs second only to the Bible as popular books), the importation of English common law, and the local focus of colonies that were largely self-governing despite the fact that Royal Governors, appointed by the King, formally presided.

We reviewed the homework problems. We spent the rest of the session working problems from the text in which we used algebra and the knowledge of the relation between the number of sides of a polygon and the number of degrees in its interior and exterior angles to solve them.

We reviewed the homework problems. We spent the rest of the session working problems from the text in which we used algebra and the knowledge of the relation between the number of sides of a polygon and the number of degrees in its interior and exterior angles to solve them.

I began today's session by returning Will's graded Chapter 2 quiz (27/30) and going over it with him. We then took up discussion of Chapter 3, addressing economic and social issues that developed as the English colonies grew and prospered. In particular, we discussed differences in economic diversity between northern and southern colonies, the importance of the colonies to the mother country both as sources of raw materials and as markets for finished (manufactured) goods, the rise of consumerism and class distinctions in the colonies, and the gender roles typically played in families of colonists (highly patriarchal) and enslaved persons (more gender equal, if not matriarchal).

* Basic nouns and adjectives
* Verbs To Have and To Be in Present
* Interrogative and negative forms
* This is - There is

We watched the first episode of the BBC "Connections" video series. This video demonstrated how completely dependent we are on technology in our everyday lives by documenting a November 1965 power failure in NYC. It explored hypothetically how hopeless modern, urban humans would be if left to our own devices and stripped of our technology. And then went back 12,000 years when climate change necessitated mass migration and how the development of the plow kicked off the journey that brought mankind to the 21st century.