Monday, February 7, 2011

As many of you no doubt already know, we had another loss to the Boone family on Sunday, February 7, 2011. Six young people heading to the beach this morning were in a terrible car accident and two--one, a senior, and one, a recent graduate--died. The others were injured in varying degrees.

Many of you know these kids, or their families and their friends. The ripple effect will be strong tomorrow at Boone and it will be a hard day for much of us.

Dr. McMillen has requested an emergency faculty meeting tomorrow morning at 7:00 a.m. to go over procedures so that each of you--our precious students--will have consistent support throughout the day should you need it. I am adjusting my lesson plans for tomorrow to allow for some breathing room--not a free period, certainly, but activities that you can do on cruise control if you need a distraction during a difficult time, or that you can do on full throttle if that serves you better.

Over the years, I have bid farewell to far too many students and fellow teachers, and each time we lose a young person I long to grab all of my students and shake them and say, "You are NOT invincible! Go live well, and for a long time, and be careful out there!" But I can't do that. All I can do is say that I love each and every one of you, and I am so sorry that these families have to suffer so untenably tonight. Much love to everyone, and know that there is support for you available should you need it tomorrow on The Reservation.

Adjusted lesson plans:

Gifted English II was going to proceed into Act II of Othello, but instead we're going to work with some content vocabulary terms relevant to both the play and the SAT.

AP Lit and Comp was going to listen to "Rime of the Ancient Mariner" by Iron Maiden and compare/contrast the lyrics to Coleridge, but instead we'll do that tomorrow. Today, a simplified chart to help you sort out the intricacies of Coleridge's figurative terms, to do or not-do.

Thursday, April 15, 2010

Today is Tax Day. Many of you don't have to file at all, since you made below the national minimum, but I encourage any of you who worked in fiscal 2009 to file since you may get a refund AND learning to fill out government paperwork is a critical life skill that will take up much of your first year of college. Just saying.

Author of the Day: Thomas Aquinas

Word of the Day: vacillate

Holiday of the Day: IRS Awareness Day/McDonald's Day

Gifted English II: Content vocabulary for Things Fall Apart; review for Part I of the novel; grammar.

APees: Farewell to Romanticism; peer review of prompts in class preparatory to AP exam; Heart of Darkness again.

Monday, October 26, 2009

Today may be a hard day for some of you; Ms. McMillen has an announcement to make regarding the passing of a BHS student that has been on the news. His name was Brandon W. and his car flipped just off of Michigan early Saturday morning. If this young man was a friend of yours, or if one of the other students involved in the accident is a friend, and you are distraught, please know that resources will be in place to help you tomorrow all day. Please come see me before class if this upsetting news is particularly jarring to you and I will direct you to the appropriate office--or escort you personally if necessary.

Unfortunately, we still have business to attend to, even in the face of tragedy. Hence, our schedule for today:

Gifted English II: Discuss "Everyday Use" by Alice Walker and prepare to make the transition into our next unit--horror in literature! I hope that you will find this interesting. The Author of the Day project list should be filled out by now, but I will still be presenting authors this week until we end the quarter. Today's author is the great, terrifying HP Lovecraft.

APees: Hamlet, Act I, scene ii soliloquy analysis, followed by (if time) Act I quiz. MacPapers are due by 3 p.m. today and tonight on www.turnitin.com. If you are having trouble logging in, you can e-mail me a Word attachment and I will upload it for you. Please send your paper by midnight Monday at jennifer.hilley@ocps.net and face no penalty.

R.I.P. David Foster Wallace

(Cross-posted from my personal blog, the address of which I will gladly give you when you graduate.)

One of my favorite novelists, David Foster Wallace, hanged himself on Friday night. It just hit the news in a major way today.



Many of you have never heard of David Foster Wallace, beyond perhaps being one of the Authors of the Day in my sophomore class if you are a former student, or perhaps hearing about John Krasinski's film adaptation of Brief Interviews of Hideous Men. There are several reasons why you should know who this writer was (was sounds so odd, since I was planning to talk about him in a very present-tense sort of way next week to the sophys) and all of them have to do with the brilliance of his work. A part-time writing professor and full-time writer, Wallace exemplified a writing style that to me was simultaneously seductive and elucidating--very, very complicated (more footnotes/endnotes than T.S. Eliot) yet often insightful and very insouciant.

He was 46 years old.

Writing is a lonely profession, even in this age of instant publication and constant interaction with ones readership. (Blogging is a microcosmic adaptation of this relatively new phenomenon.) Wallace certainly had demons--and wrote about them--but I somehow thought that he might be one who could escape those demons enough for a long life of publication and prosperity. Each year, one of my students asks, "Are all writers screwed up?" or some variation on that theme--after you hear about the drug addicts, philanderers, mental patients, and suicides, it does beg the question. Are writers crazy, or do more crazy people write? And how do you mourn for someone you never met, but for whom you felt intimate knowledge due to reading the prose he allowed the public to see?

If you want to dip your toe into the Wallace trough without killing your brain, try A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again, a collection of essays he wrote for Harper's. They sent him on a cruise to check out the fun; in typical fashion, he renamed the ship he was on (The Zenith) to something more appropriate to his mood (The Nadir). If you are feeling more ambitious, try The Broom of the System, and if you are feeling positively masochistic, try Infinite Jest, his 1996 masterwork that logs in at over 1,500 pages of complicated hilarity. Somehow it sold well.

I really liked his work, and I'm saddened that those demons brought him down. You never know what's going on in someone else's head--even if that someone repeatedly released information from that head into the mainstream.

And on a completely trivial note, now the sophys will be further convinced that writing is not a profession for the sane.