May 24, 2007 10:43 AM

The Four Years Go By

It seems like yesterday I was doing duty in Tippetts and Madi McConnell, Kristina Trudeau, Noelle Saracino, Christiane Volk, Alex Gekas, Claire Atkins, Tiffany Tseng, Emily Joseph, and all of those girls back then on the first floor were only in ninth grade. Today, they are literally days away from graduating. It is amazing to me that time moves so quickly.

The class of 2007 has given Mercersburg, it is important to recognize, some wonderful years. I think, for example, of someone like Tyler Small who has contributed to the school as an academic, as a musician, as a soccer player, as a cross country runner, and as a track star, or Alex Gekas, who started off playing soccer, but soon found herself a star on stage with Stony Batter.

May 8, 2007 8:20 AM

the poetry and the prose; the intellectual and the material

Lately, in my AP Literature and Composition class, we have been reading E.M. Forster's cunningly satiric novel Howards End. At one point, the main heroine Margaret Schlegel proffers the idea, "only connect the poetry and prose," and she is talking about integrating the intellectual aspect of life with the material. She does so as a character of sensibility and culture when she is about to marry a man who is pragmatic and business minded. The novel sets up a constellation of polarities between idealism and pragmatism; intellectualism and materialism; feminine and masculine.

It leads one to think of the relevance of such a book in today's cultural arena, particularly when cultural critics constantly harp on about the extent to which we live amid such hurried materialism, and it is a question that comes out of the book for these students: How to connect the poetry and prose?