All For Education, and Education for All
So, you don't like school...
Well hey, that's normal. High school is brutal, and believe it or not, all teachers were once students. So think of it this way... Why on earth would we, as teachers, want you to fail? Start reaching out to your teachers, we're only here to help you reach your goals, and all we want is to see you succeed.
“Speed up the film, Montag, quick. Click? Pic? Look, Eye, Now, Flick, Here, There, Swift, Pace, Up, Down, In, Out, Why, How, Who, What, Where, Eh? Uh! Bang! Smack! Wallop, Bing, Bong, Boom! Digest-digests, digest-digest-digests. Politics? One column, two sentences, a headline! Then, in mid-air, all vanishes! Whirl man’s mind around about so fast under the pumping hands of publishers, exploiters, broadcasters, that the centrifuge flings off all unnecessary, time-wasting thought!”“School is shortened, discipline relaxed, philosophies, histories, languages dropped, English and spelling gradually neglected, finally almost completely ignored. Life is immediate, the job counts, pleasure lies all about after work. Why learn anything save pressing buttons, pulling switches, fitting nuts and bolts?”
Fahrenheit 451, Ray Bradbury
What Should I Read?
I'm glad you asked...
1984, George Orwell
Flowers for Algernon, Daniel Keyes
The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night Time, Mark Haddon
Harry Potter Books 1-7, J.K. Rowling
The Tempest , William Shakespeare
Boy Meets Boy, David Levithan
Will Grayson Will Grayson, John Greene & David Levithan
Looking for Alaska, John Green
One Flew Over The Cuckoo's Nest, Ken Kesey
The Chocolate War, Robert Cormier
Slaughterhouse Five, Kurt Vonnegut
The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, Tom Wolfe
The Absolutely True Diary Of A Part-Time Indian, Sherman Alexie
Frankenstein, Mary Shelley
Watchmen, Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons
Fahrenheit 451, Ray Bradbury
All of Sarah Dessen's books, all of them
The Stranger, Albert Camus
The Master and Margarita, Mikhail Bulgakov
Damned, Chuck Palunuik
Hello God it's Me Margaret, Judy Blume
Feed, Matthew Tobin Anderson
A Prayer for Owen Meany, John Irving
What's Eating Gilbert Grape, Peter Hedges
Student Resources
Publish Your Own Work!
Ohhh, you wanted Poetry...
(here are a few of my favorites)
WALLACE STEVENS
Walt Whitman
William Blake
Sharon Olds
Billy Collins
Yusef Komunyakaa
Denis Johnson
John Keats
Marilyn Hacker
I do not know which to prefer,
The beauty of inflections
Or the beauty of innuendoes,
The blackbird whistling
Or just after.
-Wallace Stevens, 13 ways of looking at a Blackbird