This is the time of year when we vow to improve ourselves in some way, perhaps by eating less, exercising more, or getting more organized.

These perennial goals are of course laudable, but how about making it a point to exercise your brain and improve your writing and speaking skills? And the best parts of this particular New Year's resolution? It's easy, painless, and even fun.

One of the best ways we've found to do this is to visit the Grammar Girl webpage and subscribe to her podcast.

Each day she publishes a short podcast - typically no more than five or six minutes - that gives a quick lesson on some useful point of grammar or language. Her style is informal and her examples are often downright funny. If you're fortunate enough to have an MP3 player, you can download them and listen on the way to school or work.

You can find her webpage by clicking here and the links to her podcast here. Just look under the "subscribe" section on the right hand side of the page.

If Grammar Girl's daily offerings are for you, you can sign up to receive her email newsletter and follow her on Facebook and Twitter.

Happy listening!

Waiting for Godot

It's important to note that December 22 marked the ten year anniversary of the death of the great playwright Samuel Beckett.

Beckett's most enduring and well-known play is Waiting for Godot, a 'tragi-comedy' (as Beckett called it) following the inextricably linked characters Vladimir and Estragon as they wait on a bare country road for another character, Godot, to arrive.

While the play is known for being complex and perplexing, it is also a perennial favorite among students for many reasons: it is filled with witty jokes, its characters are believable and identifiable, its messages and questions are compelling, and its strangeness in general leads to mass interest and appeal. Overall, its themes are profound and thought-provoking, while its characters and lines are unforgettable.

My Theatre class will begin reading Waiting for Godot when we return from winter break, and while I am sure many students will approach the reading of the play with apprehension, I guarantee by its conclusion many more will be captivated by the plot, will feel pity for the protagonists, and will gain confidence in their abilities to decode and analyze complex literature. We will follow up reading Godot with viewing a stage version of the play, enabling students to better understand the physical movement of the characters and the metaphorical appearance of the landscape and setting.

And on a humorous sidenote, I'd like to pass on a bit of quirky trivia regarding Samuel Beckett: After Beckett moved to rural France, to write without distraction, his neighbors encountered a problem--their son was unable to fit into the small car that served as the schoolbus, and as a result the boy was unable to attend school. Beckett volunteered to drive this boy an hour and a half each way to and from school so that the boy could receive an education. The boy promised Beckett he would become famous one day, even more famous than Beckett. That boy had the disease hypothyroidism which caused him to grow to more than seven feet tall and more than 500 pounds before his premature death. That boy grew up to be Andre the Giant, arguably one of the most popular wrestlers (after Hulk Hogan) in WWE history.

Time Magazine Releases Their Top 10 Books of 2009

With 2009 coming to a close, Time magazine has released their 2009 top 10 lists of 'everything.' And since Time is one of the most respectable news magazines, I thought their 'best books' top 10 list was one to take notice of.

The best fiction book of 2009, according to Time, is Wolf Hall by Hilary Mantel. The book is set in early-17th century England, and follows protagonist Thomas Cromwell who dreams of a better and more enlightened political future for England. While Cromwell does live in romantic England, the book strips his life of any romantic glamour and instead displays the frightening scenarios of daily life, and the vain, cynical, paranoid and treacherous citizens and dignitaries who would have lived around Cromwell at that time. Cromwell is almost an action hero in the novel, but his tragic downfall is simultaneously heartbreaking and inspiring.

The best non-fiction book of 2009, according to Time, is The Age of Wonder by Richard Holmes. The book is comprised of dozens of stories, but the most memorable follows William Herschel, the impoverished artist-turned-astronomer who designed and built his own telescopes and ended up discovering Uranus after becoming infatuated and enamored with the heavens.

The remainder of the top 10 list is below:

1. Wolf Hall by Hilary Mantel
2. The Financial Lives of the Poets by Jess Walter
3. Swimming by Nicola Keegan
4. Catching Fire by Suzanne Collins
5. Everything Ravaged, Everything Burned by Wells Tower
6. Jeff in Venice, Death in Varanasi by Geoff Dyer
7. In Other Rooms, Other Wonders by Daniyal Mueenuddin
8. Beat the Reaper by Josh Bazell
9. The Windup Girl by Paolo Bacigalupi
10. The Kindly Ones by Jonathan Littell

Death of a Salesman

I am extremely excited because today my Theatre class begins Death of a Salesman. Since Arthur Miller's Pulitzer Prize-winning play is one of my all-time favorites, I cannot wait for my class to meet Willy Loman and his less-than-successful family. As characters they are enduring, and their struggle is poignant and affective. There is perhaps no better and more accessible play to portray the realities of the American Dream and to scrutinize the American family and the American landscape of the time.

What will become particular interesting is how my Theatre students will draw parallels between the characters in Long Day's Journey Into Night and those in Death of a Salesman. I'm particularly interested in observing their conclusions about the father figures in both plays and how they relate and differ.

I wonder if certain elements of Miller's characterization, especially of Willy, will become immediately evident, or if the students will discover, as I did upon first reading this play my Freshman year of high school, the triumph, tragedy and irony of Willy's existence. I cannot wait for the class to begin reading.

Personal Sacrifice in A Tale of Two Cities

November has been an interresting month. I completed the Shakespeare unit with my 10th graders and began Dickens. One of the major themes in A Tale of Two Cities is personal sacrifice. I decided to introduce this theme with a film produced by HBO that came out this year called Taking Chance.

The film is based on an essay written by Lt. Col. Mike Strobl U.S.M.C. (ret.). He volunteered in 2004 to escourt the remains of one PFC. Chance Phelps back to his home in Wyoming for burial. The essay dealt with all the people and support Strobl and Phelps received on the trip from Dover AFB. It showed the care and reverence people showed Phelps from the USAF Morgue at Dover to the drivers, to the airline staff, to common people on the highway as they made their last drive to his home.

I figured that with Marine Corps birthday on Nov. 10 and Veteran's Day on Nov. 11th, this would be the perfect time to teach the importance of personal sacrifice. I got far more than I had hoped for. In almost 14 years of teaching, I have never seen a moment where everyone of my students in the 10th grade were focused, alert, and emotional. Not one head was down, not one peep out of anyone. I got the same reaction from all four of my classes. Thank you HBO.

Semper Fi
Mr. Reilly

Alice in Wonderland

For those of you who do not yet know, the NHS drama club's spring production will be Alice in Wonderland!

After auditions concluded for Alice in Wonderland, feelings of trepidation and excitement came over me. I felt a little bit like I had just tumbled down the rabbit hole. On one hand rests the promise and anticipation surrounding the production of a play, but on the other rests the enormous responsibility and amount of work which lies ahead, especially for a production like this. While I am positive these fantastic and talented students can rise to the challenge and impress all, it will require hard work, determination and lots of support from the entire NHS community.

Alice is a unique play in the sense that the production can be interpreted in different ways and steered in several directions. It can be psychedelic, childish and cute, serious, frightening, or absurd, to name a few. Next week, during our first few official meetings since parts were decided, we as a drama club need to decide how we envision Alice. While the particular script we plan to use includes one Queen and King and doesn’t include the magical pills, the shrinking and growing, and Alice floating away through an ocean of tears, it leaves plenty of space to expand characters and scenes. The script is at once hilarious and intelligent, and is aimed at an adolescent to adult audience. Each character will be significant to the success of the play, and every student in the club, from the Hatter and Hare to the Tech Crew, is vital.

Ultimately, there is no main character in Alice in Wonderland. The challenge, rather, is to shape every character into a central and important character. The audience should be as excited to meet the Caterpillar as they are to meet Tweedledee and Tweedledum or Alice. Our goal is for each character to become a favorite for at least one audience member.

In the coming weeks a partnership will begin between the English department and the Fine and Applied Arts department to begin designing and decorating sets and props. Once the play begins to take shape both literally and figuratively I will post updates and (hopefully) pictures from rehearsals as teasers to get the NHS community excited.

Tentative dates for the play are March 19th, 20th and 21st, 2010. I expect this play to be one of the best and most exciting productions ever to occur at NHS. I hope you are all as excited for it as we are.

Stranger in a Strange Land

Taking part in a teacher exchange is an extremely interesting experience. Every day reveals new cultural differences that permeate, well, everything; what was once familiar has become strange. I find this fascinating.

My visa describes me as a 'legal alien', which actually, on occasion, isn't too far from how I feel! At these times, I am reminded of the British poet Craig Raine's poem, 'A Martian Sends A Postcard Home', which my sophmores are analyzing to further their understanding of figurative language. Essentially a puzzle, the poem addresses the dislocation of perception that occurs when the familiar is perceived from a totally new perspective. Raine uses a series of inverted metaphors to describe eight everyday objects, leaving the reader to decipher just what is being described:


A Martian Sends a Postcard Home

Caxtons are mechanical birds with many wings
and some are treasured for their markings--

they cause the eyes to melt
or the body to shriek without pain.

I have never seen one fly, but
sometimes they perch on the hand.

Mist is when the sky is tired of flight
and rests its soft machine on the ground:

then the world is dim and bookish
like engravings under tissue paper.

Rain is when the earth is television.
It has the properites of making colours darker.

Model T is a room with the lock inside --
a key is turned to free the world

for movement, so quick there is a film
to watch for anything missed.

But time is tied to the wrist
or kept in a box, ticking with impatience.

In homes, a haunted apparatus sleeps,
that snores when you pick it up.

If the ghost cries, they carry it
to their lips and soothe it to sleep

with sounds. And yet, they wake it up
deliberately, by tickling with a finger.

Only the young are allowed to suffer
openly. Adults go to a punishment room

with water but nothing to eat.
They lock the door and suffer the noises

alone. No one is exempt
and everyone's pain has a different smell.

At night, when all the colours die,
they hide in pairs

and read about themselves --
in colour, with their eyelids shut.


Did you get all eight? Answers on a postcard please...

Tintern Abbey

Wordsworth, William. 1888. Complete Poetical Works.:
"COMPOSED A FEW MILES ABOVE TINTERN ABBEY, ON REVISITING THE BANKS OF THE WYE DURING A TOUR. JULY 13, 1798

FIVE years have past; five summers, with the length
Of five long winters! and again I hear
These waters, rolling from their mountain-springs
With a soft inland murmur.--Once again
Do I behold these steep and lofty cliffs,
That on a wild secluded scene impress
Thoughts of more deep seclusion; and connect
The landscape with the quiet of the sky.
The day is come when I again repose
Here, under this dark sycamore, and view 10
These plots of cottage-ground, these orchard-tufts,
Which at this season, with their unripe fruits,
Are clad in one green hue, and lose themselves
'Mid groves and copses. Once again I see
These hedge-rows, hardly hedge-rows, little lines
Of sportive wood run wild: these pastoral farms,
Green to the very door; and wreaths of smoke
Sent up, in silence, from among the trees!
With some uncertain notice, as might seem
Of vagrant dwellers in the houseless woods, 20
Or of some Hermit's cave, where by his fire
The Hermit sits alone."

I have always wanted to travel around the globe to visit the many places and settings of which my favorite authors and my favorite characters have been a part. Indeed, this was the major theme of my application essay for my Fulbright Exchange. Wordsworth's poem, "Lines Composed A Few Miles Above Tintern Abbey..." written in July 1798 by William Wordsworth is just one such poem. I have always been drawn to this poem. The speaker's attitude towards nature and the nostalgic tone are vividly portrayed through the language and imagery in this poem. The speaker's solitude is evident through the use of words such as "wild secluded", "deep seclusion" "silence, from among the trees", and this "Hermit's cave" offer the image of a secluded valley surrounded by hills with a rolling river. There is a reverence for nature and the surroundings of the Hermit that the speaker demonstrates. The Hermit is happy, despite being alone, because he is surrounded by the peacefulness of nature. The description of the setting paints vivid pictures in the reader's mind: "waters, rolling", "steep and lofty cliffs", "wild secluded", "plots of cottage-ground", further support the image of a small village in isolation, difficult to traverse and get to, and a valley onto which one just stumbles upon as one traverses the "hedge-rows" that are "hardly-hedgerows." The beauty of the surrounding hillsides paints the scene with all the "green hue" of summer and "orchard-tufts" with "unripe fruits". There is a calm purity in the valley of Tintern, where the great structure of the Abbey lies in ruins, which offers the speaker a "quiet repose under the dark sycamore" and one which I had always desired to see. My favorite phrase from this first stanza is this: "and connect the landscape with the quiet of the sky." It is my favorite because it is calming - for me it provides an image of a mind in turmoil finally connecting with nature and coming to a restful state of existence as the speaker quietly enjoys the beauty of his surroundings. To some extent this exchange experience has been such a calming and connecting experience with my own inner spirit.

It was an emotional journey I undertook this week as I found my way to Tintern and walked the ruins of the Abbey. While I have not included the poem in its entirety here, as it is quite long, I could go on and on with the analysis. The seclusion and the peace pervades the village and the Abbey ruins. Perhaps as the weeks pass and even after I return I will continue to add the stanzas and resulting reflections. The second benefit of this experience is that it has provided me the opportunity to reconnect with some great poetry that I had all but forgotten as a student, but see all too often only as a teacher.

Long Day's Journey Into Night

We're reading Long Day's Journey Into Night in theater class right now, and the students are encountering The Tyrone's, a dysfunctional family to say the least. Their predictions about the play were that it was going to be boring, somewhat funny, or inaccessible 'like Shakespeare.'

What is impressing me most, however, is that so many of them have not only fully grasped the flaws and idiosyncrasies of these characters, but that they are discussing, all on their own, the family's inability to be truthful, genuine and caring towards one another. They are passionately voicing their frustrations regarding the family's inability to care for Edmund, and Mary and Tyrone's tragic flaws. There are some in the class that didn't want to stop reading today, begging to take a copy of the play home this weekend in order to continue the Tyrone's story.

Long Day's Journey Into Night is heart-wrenching, frustrating and painful. These characters are deep, multi-dimensional, and anything but static or simple. They are lost, imperfect, tragic characters unable to speak truthfully to one another. The students get it, and they comprehend much more than they anticipated. This class is changing many of their preconceptions about theater, drama, and literature in general.

One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich

Since Nobel Peace Prizes are so much in the news, it's worth mentioning that yesterday - October 8 - was the day in 1970 that Russian author Alexander Solzhenitsyn won the Prize for his groundbreaking novel One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich.

Published in 1962, One Day allows readers a glimpse into the life of the title character, Ivan Denisovich, a prisoner in a Soviet gulag. The novel is based on Solzhenitsyn's own sufferings as a prisoner, and its portrayal of the stark and inhumane conditions of Stalin's prison camps shocked the world.