Most of you are basking in the warmth of your exceptional class grade. You are fortunate enough to have created a nice buffer for yourself. But be warned. It's time to Duck and Cover. Duck and Cover was a series of animated films in the 1950s starring Burt the Turtle that warned of what you should do in the pending atomic war.

It's pretty humorous in retrospect (look it up), but I digress. The point is that your grades have created for you the ability to face up to what is yet to come. But be forewarned. Duck and Cover. Your grades over the next 4 1/2 weeks will not equal what you have accomplished already. What we do gets progressively harder. I won't be innundating you with work, but what I do ask will be much more intense, requiring you to raise the bar and to think on another level. And I mean that literally: In education there are six level of questioning known as Bloom's Taxonomy. The lower three levels are pretty familiar to us. They require rote memorization, like your times tables or the state capitals, or the ability to do mechanical tasks. The upper three levels are where we're headed and require analysis, synthesis and evaluation. You're all good writers by now. You can do the mechanical tasks like punctuation and style. Now you're really going to have to THINK first.

Remember, forewarned is forearmed, so be prepared and Duck and Cover.