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...