Dear Mr. Luizzi,

This has been my first year in an honors English class, so I have been learning a lot about English as well how to manage the heavy work load that was placed upon me at certain times during the year. The word that I would have to use to describe this year is challenging. I was not expecting to read all the books I did this year in your class, and had to learn how to manage my time so that I was able to complete all the projects on time. I am glad that it was challenging because next year I am going to take AP history, so I am going to need to know how to balance my time.

The expectations that I entered this year was that the class was going to consist of a lot of reading and hard grading. Well expectation of a lot of reading was definately surpassed because I do not think that I have done that much reading in one year in all my years of English. In freshman year I had only read two novels and now I am reading more than I can count. I did not think that the grading was too hard, because I did the best out of all my classes this year in English. Since I was in college prep last year I did not think that I had the ability to get A's in this class. So I must be a better writer than I thought I was. The only thing that I do not think we did enough of was discussing the books that we read. The journals helped me get my own thoughts of the books well developed, but I did not really get to hear a lot of what other people thought about the books.

When I am discussing my expirence of Honors English II in twenty years, which I am sure everyone is dying to hear about, I think I will remember the literary analysis I wrote on The Age of Innocence . That paper I ended up having to write over three times, and I do not think that I have ever put so much effort in a paper ever. But what I learned from it was how to analyize a book rather than just give a summary.

As I sadly leave English class to go off to lay in the sun, I know that I will be deeply crushed that I cannot be in the classroom learning English at 8:30 in the morning. But when I finally get around to thinking about this year of English I think I feel that what I left behind is not ever finishing Julius Caesar . Even though I did not like the play because I do not like Shakespeare, I still feel that was going to be a big part of the year, but ended up being almost nothing. I just find it ironic that Caesar was a part of the circulum, but we never actually did much with it.

The best advice I could give you for next year is to give more feedback on papers. You did that very well with my literary analysis, and from that I was able to create a good paper. But as the year went on, I did not get mcuh feedback from you, and I think that is what hurt some of my grade in the Asher Lev project. Also you may want to give more time for projects because on the literary analysis I had enough time, but my Asher project I did not, and my grades were symbolic of that problem. While I am on the topic of giving advice I would want to tell the freshmen to be prepared to do a lot of reading. If anything was overly hard this year, it would be the amount of reading we did.

My final thoughts on this year is that I did a lot of reading, but it as definately expanded my mind. I will do reading over the summer, but it will not be the good litterature that I have read this year. It was a fun year, but I am glad that all the writing is over with. If anything I have become a much better typer. I do not have to look at my fingers anymore. Well have a good summer and do not do too much English. Maybe I will see you senior year because I might take Mythology.