Ah, Senior year.
A good friend and artistic inspiration of mine, Sara Gochenour, who graduated last year gave me some sage advice: "Mia, when it's your senior year, you must choose one of two paths. The Stress Management path or the AP Calculus path."
She warned me to choose carefully, because either path had the potential to break me. After much consideration, I decided to pull on my big girl pants and liberally decorate my schedule with the words "Advanced Placement."
After the first week in the class, I knew I had made the right decision.
I try not to be a judgmental pupil, but let's be honest. Sometimes it's hard to keep down the skeptical eyebrow, or not shoot your friend a quick look of contempt. In this class, I had no problem with this. I knew from the beginning it was not a bunch of rowdy kids, a weary teacher and a curriculum.
It was the poems that got to me. I may be a total dork, but that first poem read to us, it was called something like Intro to Poety, or Poetry 101, made me smile. Smile in the way that Kurt Cobain might smile at a stash of heroin, smile in the way that Tim Robbins smiled when he burst out of the ground, covered in filth and rain in Shawshank Redemption. Okay, maybe I'm being a little melodramatic here, but you get the picture, I was relieved. I was relieved to be in a class where we considered the writing composition classes of Harvard student, relieved to feel an excited stirring within me when I heard my classmates read from their creative writing, ecstatic to consider the difference between literature and commercial fiction.
I think I understood most of the topics covered this week, but wish I would have participated a little bit more. Maybe once we get into the swing of things. I love class discussions in classes where the students actually care about the material,
I look forward to the rest of this class and year, and hope to get feedback from you, Mr. Schoenborn.
Mia.