Hey, Professor / Email Received From Michael Two Weeks Into Our Distance-Learning Course I hope this email finds you well. Thank you for reaching out and expressing your concern. This transition has been a little of a challenge for me. I’ve been trying to adjust to feeling a lot more anxiety after being laid off from my job as a waiter and getting used to spending much more time at home, where I live with my brother, his wife, and their (quite rambunctious) three-year-old son. I am used to being able to do my coursework in the library or at cafes and I am still adjusting to having to do the majority of my work at home. As a result, I have fallen a little behind in my coursework. Hey, Professor / Email Received From Patrick Five Weeks Into Our Distance-Learning Course Unfortunately the course assignments I completed for this session of distance learning are on my work computer. I have to go in to pick up some belongings, anyway, so I’ll send the assignments by then. Sorry for the delay; my mom got sick and she’s immunocompromised, so it has been a rough couple of days. I appreciate how accommodating you have been to our class in this trying time. The reading and thinking assignments you’ve created to make up the distance learning half of our course have both been a light in this time. I hope that reading our completed assignments brings you a similar light. Hello Professor Eidelberg / Email Received From Christina Six Weeks Into Our Distance-Learning Course I know that this is a lot to just unload in an email but I felt that I wanted you to understand why I have not been able to get to my work as productively as I’d like to ideally, as well as confide in you about my current mental and physical health. I have been sluggish, tired, unmotivated, lethargic, and plain struggling to do many tasks beyond existing from moment to moment. I am trying to research more resources for therapy, as I have neglected this for a few months... Dear Professor Eidelberg / Email Received From Shanya After Seven Weeks of Distance-Learning Ends I’m glad to hear you have been doing well and keeping busy since our course ended. My family is doing great; we’ve been using this time to share some of our passions — one of mine, as you know, being writing — and the reception has been amazing. I can’t wait to read and re-read our course’s book on “Some Day: The Literature of Waiting.” Also, I have recommended your other Hunter College humanities course, "The Teacher and Student in Literature," to many friends — but ironically, also recommended that they wait a semester if forced to take the class online. Your courses are simply too magical to be minimized.

Being thirteen is happy, sad, humiliating, surprising, wonderful, awful, exciting, boring -- in other words, full of ups and downs. The thirteen-year-olds in Gary Soto's thirteen stories experience all this and more. In one story, a girl's world is turned upside down when she visits a college campus where she expects to find a rarified atmosphere of intellectual pursuit, only to meet a tour guide who is tattooed, overly pierced, hungover, and not at all focused on academics. In another, two girls test the attraction of their new bodies by flirting with boys at a mall and then find themselves in an uncomfortable and somewhat frightening situation. The stories in this book are about family relationships, friendships, self-worth, and questions of integrity.

Dez Cylan is going through a rough period in his life. His girlfriend has just broken up with him, leaving him to wallow in misery in the small city of Revmont, Massachusetts. Professor Bruce Ulrich is tracing the rare Venus transit and comes across a haunting document from 1882, the last time the transit occurred. He questions his ethical nature about publicizing the information, all the while dealing with a painful divorce. Both Dez and Professor Ulrich brace themselves for the terror that envelops the city once the Venus transit begins to take shape, as its cosmic effects will leave them fighting for their lives. They will find that their enemy is the black night sky.