With Ms. Ganem's advice in mind, Archie returns to Ms. Mioli to catch up on some notes that she missed when she was out sick. Archie has been reading her first Shakespeare play and is in the process of writing a five-paragraph essay on it, but Archie knows that grammar is important too and she hangs on everything Ms. Ganem says about nouns, verbs, adjectives, prepositions and the like. But it does mean that Archie and her classmates learn fundamental ideas in physics without slaving over complex math problems. Today they dropped golf balls off the second-floor balcony to see if gravity really works, and tomorrow they'll figure out how fast the Earth travels around the sun. It's all good.
Every day brings new words and greater ease of translation.
Like most 8th graders, Archie gets a handful of study halls during the week.