Nevertheless, Mercersburg proffers the viewer a particular beauty. One of the qualities or aspects that add to this particular beauty is the space between buildings and the large spaces that surround them, and being set, of course, in this gorgeous valley. Another quality, of course, is the diversity of the sorts of buildings--the architectural richness.
Every school year we begin early on with a seminar on our summer reading. For example, this year we began by discussing Elizabeth Kolbert's Field Notes from a Catastrophe. While the Academy's summer reading program lends itself to being a compulsory program, where students are expected to read, the seminar discussions recreate, at times, something of the friendly banter of a book group. That is, meeting to discuss the book becomes the consummate pleasure of the project. Knowing that everyone in the school is discussing the same book, the same themes and issues is compelling, affirming and intriguing. It's as if the whole school is one behemoth book club for a day.
Book clubs are wonderful institutions. One gets the private pleasure of reading the book and then the pleasure of the social occasion of discussing it. People of all sorts come together to trade ideas on the given text. There may be disagreements or disputes, but there is mostly sharing of ideas and insights that lead to a bridging of gaps between otherwise isolated selves. The text becomes a common ground upon which we can meet to understand one another's predilections and personalities.
Recently, a colleague in the English Department, who was looking over his annotations of a Wordsworth poem, delighted in what the markings brought, and he thereby remembered the last time he taught the poem, when he initially annotated it. The notes in the book allowed him to relive the ecstasy of first teaching that poem. They also serve, obviously, as a guide to him for his teaching it again. He can borrow on his own learning. It is as if he has created hyperlinks to his memory by making these notes to himself. Some of the notes, then again, are indecipherable because he does not remember what the circled word is circled for. It occured to me that we, English teachers, are among the few who make marks in books actively, copiously and without shame.
So many people find it impossible to take a pencil or pen to a book. They feel as if they are defacing a sacrosanct object by writing in the margins of a book or by circling a word. They learn this from librarians in their youth. And yet, others take pleasure in writing vast amounts, cramming notes in the corner of pages. In my trade, we teach students to embark on the latter path by encouraging them to actively read with a pencil, countermanding all the years of the local librarian spent inculcating them to respect books---years spent teaching them not to tear or bend pages, and certainly not write on them.
Visiting alumni often bring the greatest pleasure to faculty when they stop by to say hello. Such visits generally bring with them the confirmation that the work we have done with these former students has been enormously valuable to them. As an English teacher, again and again, I am told by alumni that they have been well-prepared for college writing by our English department.
This preparation--this work, it is important to indicate, takes place over four years of a curriculum. That is, no one single teacher alone teaches a student to write; it takes time to develop as a writer. The vocabulary building, grammar instruction, composition skills that a teacher incorporates in a ninth grade curriculum merely begins the process that may end in a very challenging AP Literature and Composition course in the senior year, a course that enables the student to hone higher level writing skills. We work together in a vertical way to bring students along in their efforts to become competent or more than competent writers.
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