3Rs students: I've just finished reading the journals. Here was grand stuff indeed, a collage of activities, opinions, and styles in living. Keep up the good work when your journals are returned this week. One tip: if at all possible, write your journals in pen. Ink lasts longer than pencil lead and is easier to read.

Latin II: Keep learning the principal parts to verbs. Several of you need to work hard on these forms. Don't put it off. Just learn them and get the task out of the way. After last week's lesson, you should see why these are vital to your progress in Latin.

English Lit. & Hist.: As we move into Chaucer's Prologue and Tales, pay attention to the people we meet--how they're dressed, what they do for a living, how they regard life. More than most documents we'll read this year, The Canterbury Tales are wonderful resources for history and literature combined.

Students: embrace your education. Throw yourselves into your learning, even when the subject seems uninteresting to you. Recently I spoke with a man in his forties, a musician, who had never heard of Solomon or of The Song of Songs. Here was a human being well-read in contemporary literature, but who has no knowledge of the Bible (which, whether one is a Christian or not, is the basis, along with Homer, for much of Western thought and literature). Push yourselves. Latin conjugations, close-reading a difficult poem, the division of polynomials: all require thought, time, sweat, and in some cases, suffering. Enter into the struggle. "Try again," Samuel Beckett once wrote. "Fail again. Fail better."

Character is fate. --Heracleitus