October 25, 2007 10:00 PM

It's College Time: Letters of Recommendation

Rain has finally arrived in the Tuscarora region of Pennsylvania, and the trees are coloring quite nicely. Fall sports teams can see the finish line in terms of the ending of their seasons. November first is rolling up and many seniors are feeling the first overwhelming stress of meeting college application deadlines, so much so that it will for a few weeks affect their performance in classes. Trying to complete the regular work on top of the college applications can be daunting for some.

It is also a time for teachers to begin thinking about colleges, too. Now the season of the college recommendation is upon us. Generally, it is a privilege and a pleasure to write these letters for students we've known for four years and watch grow up and excel. The difficulty lay in the format, really. I always tell students the hardest the thing to do is to write about yourself--I think that's what makes the college essay such a challenge for most of them. It is also difficult to write a letter of recommendation on a conceptual level, because usually one has much more to offer up than can fit in a letter.

October 11, 2007 10:00 PM

Bringing Poetry Down from the Tower

In 2004, Mercersburg was fortunate enough to have a visit from former Poet Laureate Robert Pinsky. At the time, Pinsky had recently finished his stint  as Laureate and was still promoting a huge project he started under the auspices of the office. He was traveling the country encouraging ordinary folk to read their favorite poems aloud in public readings; he called it the Favorite Poem Project. In this way, Pinsky began to make poetry a more viable art for the ordinary soul--accessible and alive to everyone. It was his attempt to bring the art down from the ivory tower, if you will. He was not the last Poet Laureate to attempt such a thing.

More recently, the very engaging Billy Collins started a web site for high school students called poetry 180, so they could have access to a poem for each day of school in a 180 day school year. All of the poems on the site are highly accessible; none are too rarefied or obscure to intimidate the reader. His effort, of course, like Pinsky's is really to make poetry a living, relevant art to the day-to-day person. In this case, the high school student.