June, 9th,1999

Dear Mr. Luizzi,

First, I’d like to thank you for a great year! We’ve had some good times together. I definitely learned a lot from you this year and hopefully you learned something from the class. If I don’t bump into you over the summer, like in Costco or something, I’ll see you next year. I hope my suggestions allow you to improve on your teaching methods. Good luck with next year’s kids! This class did live up to my expectations. At first, I thought this class would be a nightmare due to the amount of work being poured on us and being introduced to HTML etc. Yet, reflecting back upon it now shows that I did succeed in overcoming all the work you gave us. I think that you should do the same next year because it definitely will prepare the kids for other teachers. I know that it will help me. I’m planning on taking AP US History next year and I hear that a lot of reading is involved. I don’t how much it will be compared to your pace but it will help somehow. We didn’t squeeze so many books into a year for nothing! Also, the large amount of reading will help our vocabulary, thus possibly improving our SAT verbal score. I think that you should definitely continue with vocab. Though it was a pain, 3 to 4 weeks is plenty of time to complete one lesson. I also learned a lot of words and the quizzes are easy A’s! This class fell short of my expectations in only a few regards. One, when I first came to 10th grade, young and naive, I was hoping for a little more "action". What I mean is maybe to go on more field trips and leave the seats of the classroom more. While we got to do this periodically over the year for the web pages I didn’t attend one field trip this entire year- in any class! I went on more field trips in one year of grade school, than 2 years of high school. Another possible improvement is more variety of books. While I don’t regret reading any of the books we read this year (well, maybe The Joy Luck Club-too feminine) it would be nice to have more choices similar to reading David Copperfield instead of something else. Just a suggestion. Perhaps the new 10th grade girls would prefer more female writers rather than the all-male line up we currently have. Other than that, keep up the good work. Perhaps, when I reminisce of my high school days with my spouse, I would comment on the web pages. This is because I didn’t know to much about the web before the past year, I didn’t the opportunities it held. I now have knowledge of a new medium which I can mold to any which way. The HTML was also introduced at the time when the Internet was at its peak (it might still be, I don’t know). Anyway, that I think is the most memorable part of my 10th grade English experience. If I were to leave one "thing" from 10th grade English behind it would probably be... the research paper we wrote as a critical analysis. While it definetly did help our writing skills, I didn’t do so well on it and it brought down my grade. This also happened because you made it count as half our 3rd marking grade. I think that more emphasis should be put on finding quality sources and more guidance while taking notes in the library. I got a little lost in there. A little advice to those who have yet to experience Mr. Luizzi’s tyranny- Don’t procrastinate. Spread a vocab chapter throughout the month instead of waiting to the last minute. Also, upload things right after you type them so you won’t be in a mad rush when the end of the year rolls around. Finally, always do the little homework that Mr. Luizzi gives you because each assignment ends up counting a lot because there are so few.

Sincerely,

Andrew Beck