Sunday, August 11, 2019

“Once a journey is designed, equipped, and put in process, a new factor enters and takes over. A trip, a safari, an exploration, is an entity, different from all other journeys. It has personality, temperament, individuality, uniqueness. A journey is a person in itself; no two are alike. And all plans, safeguards, policing, and coercion are fruitless. We find after years of struggle that we do not take a trip; a trip takes us. Tour masters, schedules, reservations, brass-bound and inevitable, dash themselves to wreckage on the personality of the trip. Only when this is recognized can the blown-in-the glass bum relax and go along with it. Only then do the frustrations fall away. In this a journey is like marriage. The certain way to be wrong is to think you control it.” - John Steinbeck

Friday, May 17, 2019

Next year's 11 AP English:

Gatewood
First read: The Things They Carried, by Tim O'Brien
Class Website
Twitter: @gwoodEDU

Cline

email socline@smsd.org for updates

Update from counseling regarding schedules for next year:

Schedule Changes are VERY UNLIKELY if they have changed their mind or want a specific teacher or hour.

Schedule Changes are LIKELY if there is an error, graduation requirements are missing, or a teacher has or has changed a recommendation for the student.

Counselors will be taking requests for changes between July 22nd – Aug 2nd.

Tuesday, May 14, 2019

If you are missing an assignment, it is your responsibility to make it up.  As has been stated multiple times over an extended period, please do so by Friday or it will remain a 0 permanently, unless special arrangements are made for Monday.
Contact me to schedule if needed; it can be made up during class time Wed/Thu/Fri/*Mon.

What we need to do is always lean into the future; when the world changes around you and when it changes against you - what used to be a tail wind is now a head wind - you have to lean into that and figure out what to do because complaining isn't a strategy.
- Jeff Bezos

Monday, May 13, 2019

If you missed class today (Monday, May 13) make sure you check in with someone who was here so you can get the finals questions.  We went over 35 of the 50 in class, questions only (not the possible answers though) so you know what direction the test is headed.  We've talked all year about isolating essential information; this is your final chance to do so.

Tuesday, May 7, 2019

Hello

Shooting Rats at the Bibb County Dump   
by David Bottoms 

Loaded on beer and whiskey, we ride
to the dump in carloads
to turn our headlights across the wasted field,
freeze the startled eyes of rats against mounds of rubbish.

Shot in the head, they jump only once, lie still
like dead beer cans.
Shot in the gut or rump, they writhe and try to burrow
into garbage, hide in old truck tires,
rusty oil drums, cardboard boxes scattered across the mounds,
or else drag themselves on forelegs across our beams of light
toward the darkness at the edge of the dump.

It's the light they believe kills.
We drink and load again, let them crawl
for all they're worth into the darkness we're headed for.



Sonnet 8 [Set me where as the sun doth parch the green]   
by Petrarch -translated by Henry Howard
 
Set me where as the sun doth parch the green,
Or where his beams do not dissolve the ice;
In temperate heat where he is felt and seen;
With proud people, in presence sad and wise;
Set me in base, or yet in high degree,
In the long night, or in the shortest day,
In clear weather, or where mists thickest be,
In lost youth, or when my hairs be grey;
Set me in earth, in heaven, or yet in hell,
In hill, in dale, or in the foaming flood;
Thrall, or at large, alive where so I dwell,
Sick, or in health, in ill fame or good:
Yours will I be, and with that only thought
Comfort myself when that my hope is nought.



Naomi Shihab Nye, "The Cookies."

On Union Boulevard, St. Louis, in the 1950's, there were women in their eighties who lived with the shades drawn, who hid like bats in the caves they claimed for home. Neighbors of my grandmother, they could be faintly heard through a ceiling or wall. A drawer opening. The slow thump of a shoe. Who they were and whom they were mourning (someone had always just died) intrigued me. Me, the child who knew where the cookies waited in Grandma's kitchen closet. Who lined five varieties up on the table and bit from each one in succession, knowing my mother would never let me do this at home. Who sold Girl Scout cookies door-to-door in annual tradition, who sold fifty boxes, who won The Prize. My grandmother told me which doors to knock on. Whispered secretly, "She'll take three boxes—wait and see."
Hand-in-hand we climbed the dark stairs, knocked on the doors. I shivered, held Grandma tighter, remember still the smell which was curiously fragrant, a sweet soup of talcum powder, folded curtains, roses pressed in a book. Was that what years smelled like? The door would miraculously open and a withered face framed there would peer oddly at me as if I had come from another world. Maybe I had. "Come in," it would say, or "Yes?" and I would mumble something about cookies, feeling foolish, feeling like the one who places a can of beans next to an altar marked For the Poor and then has to stare at it—the beans next to the cross—all through the worship. Feeling I should have brought more, as if I shouldn't be selling something to these women, but giving them a gift, some new breath, assurance that there was still a child's world out there, green grass, scabby knees, a playground where you could stretch your legs higher than your head. There were still Easter eggs lodged in the mouths of drainpipes and sleds on frozen hills, that joyous scream of flying toward yourself in the snow. Squirrels storing nuts, kittens being born with eyes closed; there was still everything tiny, unformed, flung wide open into the air!
But how did you carry such an assurance? In those hallways, standing before those thin gray wisps of women, with Grandma slinking back and pushing me forward to go in alone, I didn't know. There was something here which also smelled like life. But it was a life I hadn't learned yet. I had never outlived anything I knew of, except one yellow cat. I never had saved a photograph. For me life was a bounce, an unending burst of pleasures. Vaguely I imagined what a life of recollection could be, as already I was haunted by a sense of my own lost baby years, golden rings I slipped on and off my heart. Would I be one of those women?
Their rooms were shrines of upholstery and lace. Silent radios standing under stacks of magazines. Did they work? Could I turn the knobs? Questions I wouldn't ask here. Windows with shades pulled low, so the light peeping through took on a changed quality, as if it were brighter or dimmer than I remembered. And portraits, photographs, on walls, on tables, faces strangely familiar, as if I was destined to know them. I asked no questions and the women never questioned me. Never asked where the money went, had the price gone up since last year, were there any additional flavors. They bought what they remembered—if it was peanut-butter last year, peanut-butter this year would be fine. They brought the coins from jars, from pocketbooks without handles, counted them carefully before me, while I stared at their thin crops of knotted hair. A Sunday brooch pinned loosely to the shoulder of an everyday dress. What were these women thinking of?
And the door would close softly behind me, transaction complete, the closing click like a drawer sliding back, a world slid quietly out of sight, and I was free to return to my own universe, to Grandma standing with arms folded in the courtyard, staring peacefully up at a bluejay or sprouting leaf. Suddenly I'd see Grandma in her dress of tiny flowers, curly gray permanent, tightly laced shoes, as one of them—but then she'd turn, laugh, "Did she buy?" and again belong to me.
Gray women in rooms with the shades drawn . . . weeks later the cookies would come. I would stack the boxes, make my delivery rounds to the sleeping doors. This time I would be businesslike, I would rap firmly, "Hello Ma'am, here are the cookies you ordered." And the face would peer up, uncertain . . . cookies? . . . as if for a moment we were floating in the space between us. What I did (carefully balancing boxes in both my arms, wondering who would eat the cookies—I was the only child ever seen in that building) or what she did (reaching out with floating hands to touch what she had bought) had little to do with who we were, had been, or ever would be.


Because I could not stop for Death,
He kindly stopped for me;
The carriage held but just ourselves
And Immortality.

We slowly drove, he knew no haste,
And I had put away
My labor, and my leisure too,
For his civility.

We passed the school, where children strove
At recess, in the ring;
We passed the fields of gazing grain,
We passed the setting sun.

Or rather, he passed us;
The dews grew quivering and chill,
For only gossamer my gown,
My tippet only tulle.

We paused before house that seemed
A swelling of the ground;
The roof was scarcely visible,
The cornice but a mound.

Since then 'tis centuries, and yet each
Feels shorter than the day
I first surmised the horses' heads
Were toward eternity.

Emily Dickinson



Hot Dads + Everyone Else! Thank You! - w4m - 45 (Cobble Hill/Park Slope)
Date: 2012-09-04, 9:11PM EDT

I walk the streets of our fine neighborhoods and every day I am totally floored by the very fine manhood that is out there. Maybe it's hormone surges that are keeping my eyes wandering but I would like to give a big shout out to all the hot dads, youngish hipster dudes, guys with dogs, guys on bikes, guys drinking beer, guys walking down the street, pushing ridiculously expensive strollers, sitting in open windows, swimming/working out at the Y, drinking fair trade coffee, waiting for the F train and just living -- you are such an amazing and welcome embellishment to this already great neighborhood and I cannot stop appreciating you.

Thank you! Thank you! Thank you for being fit, young or not, fashionable, good looking, friendly and well-groomed eye candy. I don't want to objectify you because so many of you seem intellectual, even if you're not actually but, I love seeing your taut skin or scruffy beards, when you stand there stroking/scratching your tight stomach (the muscular V makes me swoon) with your unironic t-shirt slightly hiked up while you chat, straddling your fixed gear bike. I have to stop myself from reaching out to touch you sometimes.

And, to those few of you who actually look me in the face and smile when you catch me checking you out -- extra special thanks for looking past the wedding ring, the kid, the dog, the bag full of crap, the harried look, the signs of having worshipped the sun unwisely in my youth and the jiggly arms/thighs/gut. You make me feel like a goddess! Oh how I wish one of you would speak to me one day to say something more meaningful than "Caramel Macchiato for ______." Take the chance and say hello. You never know.