Dear New Students in Mrs. Duke’s Class,

I know that when you first found out Mrs. Duke was going to be your English teacher the first thing you probably did was freak out, because that is what most people do.  There have been so many rumors about how hard the class is and about the huge workload.  Well, I am here to tell you that those rumors are very true.  However, there are really only a couple of really easy things you must do to survive junior English in Mrs. Duke’s class.  If you do these few easy things, it will really make the year and the class much easier.  Take my advice.  I had her for two years in a row and did none of this, and it made the class so much harder than it had to be.    

1)   Look ahead!  Most of the time assignments are put up very far in advance for a reason and if you can get a head start on them it will really, really help!  Chances are that if they are up there in advance, they are going to take more time to do and are a little more in-depth than the normal homework assignments.    

2)    READ THE BOOKS!  Mrs. Duke can always, always, always tell when you haven’t read no matter how good you think you are at hiding it, so don’t even try.  I never got away with it!  If you don’t read, you wont be prepared for what is going on in class the next day and it will make class miserable.  Plus, there are often reading quizzes. 

3)    Make sure you blog by Monday! Once you fall behind with blogs it is so hard to catch back up because there are always going to be more assigned for the next week!

4)    Participate in class!  Don’t talk to other people! Once my participation grade got put in this semester, my grade dropped a lot! And you never know what it is until the end, so make sure you don’t go crazy and participate!

5)    Actually learn the vocabulary instead of just memorizing the words.  This was my downfall of the year.  Cramming doesn’t work for vocabulary quizzes in this class.  There is no such thing as a “normal” vocabulary quiz in here. 

6)    Do your homework every night.  Everything is worth a lot of points because there is no such thing as “busy work” in this class.  If you do it and do it well, you will get all the points.  However, if you don’t do it at all or it is clear that it isn’t your best, you are going to lose easy points. 

7) When Mrs. Duke tells you to get started on something or you will be regretting it later, you should definitely take that advice.  She is the one who assigned it, so she knows how much work it is going to require to complete it.  

If you do these simple things, it will make Mrs. Duke’s class much less stressful and not as bad as all of those rumors you have probably heard! Good luck and I hope you don’t have too stressful of a year!!  

I really enjoyed your reading of Hamlet. My high school English class just got finished “reading” it, but we really listened to you read it for the most part. I liked it better that way; because I would much rather listen to you read it then read it myself. I think you read with a great British accent for all of the characters. However, I do feel like all of the men in the play sounded exactly alike and all of the women sounded exactly alike. That made it a little confusing sometimes, but since we were all reading a long in our books it really wasn’t a big deal. I really enjoyed how you followed the book so closely. That made it so much easier to follow along because they were pretty much the same word-for-word.

As for your interpretation of the play, most of the things were the same way that I interpreted them. We also watched a film of Hamlet for Act 5, and the queen in that is way more bold and decisive than you have her in your reading. I think that is how I picture her too, or at least that is how I want to picture her. I liked listening to your reading much better than watching the movie because the way I pictured all of the characters from hearing you describe their actions and what they look like was completely different from how this movie had them casted.
Thank you so much for producing this audio version! It was wonderful!

Sincerely,
Liz

Dear Mr. Kenneth Branagh,

I really enjoyed your performance of Hamlet!  Our English class was reading it this year and we only watched the last act to see how the performance compared and went along with our reading of it.  Most of the characters were exactly how I envisioned them and the set was perfect!  I really liked how closely the performance followed the book.  However, no offense, but I think you were a little too old to play Hamlet.  Shakespeare makes him seem young and like he was returning from college or something when his father died and his mother got remarried.  He is portrayed to still be a young boy and Hamlet in the performance looked much too old to be playing the Hamlet that Shakespeare wrote about.  I think you did a very good job portraying the emotions of Hamlet.  As we all know, Hamlet is a very emotional person.  Whenever he finds out it was Ophelia’s funeral he was watching, he was very upset and angered and you did a very good job or portraying those feelings to the audience!

I also thought the ending was a bit of a stretch.  Hamlet throwing the sword and pinning Claudius to the throne was a little exaggerated and unrealistic.  I mean, what are the chances of a sword being thrown from off a balcony hitting a moving object and pinning him to the throne?  I also thought it was a bit strange how the chandelier came swinging from the ceiling and hit Claudius right in the face.  The queen was a lot different in the performance than I imagined her.  She didn’t seem as weak and quiet in the performance as she was in the play.  She seemed like she was more than “just there.” 

Overall, I really enjoyed your performance and think the performance as a whole was very good and entertaining!

Sincerely,

Liz

Okay so before I even started reading this part I knew exactly what was going to happen.  There had been so much foreshadowing and it was completely obvious that Ros and Guild were going to die.  I mean the title of the book is even called Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are DEAD!!!! So how could they not die in the last part of the book? Also, Hamlet was supposed to be sent to England to die but Ros and Guild were sent in his place, so it was obvious that they were going to be the ones to die.  I think this ties into what we were talking about in class today.  We were talking about how there had to be some sort of closing to Hamlet and we all decided that more people had to die for all of the stories to end.  Ros and Guild are about to die to finish off their little part of the story that they are in.  

Throughout the whole play Ros and Guild have mentioned life and death a lot.  I find it ironic how they talk about it so much and then in the end they both die.  I don’t like how we didn’t know how Hamlet ends yet and then in the end of this book it shows us!! 

The Pardoner group went the next day.  They all seemed to have adequate knowledge of the tale and could really go deep into the meanings of things.  As I was doing my project on The Wife of Bath, I noticed that the Pardoner often interrupted, and I thought he was interrupting for good reasons.  After learning about the Pardoner and finding out about his personality, I realized that he was probably being sarcastic and was most likely drunk.  The Pardoner was a huge hypocrite.  He said the three worst things to do were drink, swear, and gamble.  However, before he started to tell his tale he had to get a strong drink.  He was a huge drunk.  He would also use God’s name in vain right after he said that swearing was horrible.  The Pardoner was a liar and fake also.  He went around telling people that he collecting money for the church, but was really stealing it for himself.  The best part about this groups presentation was the brownies at the end