9th grade: Mr. Robinson
In 9th grade it got real. We were in Pre-IB English, and it wasn’t for sissies any more. This was going to be hard. We suddenly had to dive into literature like never before. We had to do this new thing called analyzing. We had to provide specific proof. Enter Mr. Robinson, the most odd English teacher yet.
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8th grade: I was a big dog on middle school campus. I felt both able and allowed to be mischievous. And throughout most of the year I had mixed feelings about Mrs. Humphrey, the short, stern-faced, saccharine, classically PTA-mom-like teacher of my final middle school year.
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7th grade: Mr. Benson
I suddenly felt older that year, no longer one of the little tots who came in to middle school. Although we’d act like small children or fearful pupils in other classes, I found myself in command of a kind of adult respect around Mr. Benson.
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6th Grade: Mr. Yuhas
When I entered 6th grade, Mr. Yuhas was the first male teacher I ever had in public school who wasn’t a gym teacher, the first man to teach me academics. He was a football coach/English teacher, the kind of thing you’d think was rare, and maybe it is. I only know of one other football coach/English teacher.
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Batman has always been famous for his villains almost more than the hero himself. Instead of being based on superpowers, these criminals are based on their own kind of gimmicks, some sort of symbolic costume and modus operandi that makes them more realistic than superpower villains, yet more meaningful than the Dick Tracy gangsters they sometimes resemble. Continue reading
Despising self-help books, I am always skeptical of any non-fiction book advertised to guide me into helping myself make myself feel better, live better, do anything better for my mental and emotional health. Most of them out there are written by jack wagons. Ironically, it is the fixation on the self itself that make such a genre as “self help” complete malarkey.
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Did Donna Tart write a masterpiece or is she a thief piggybacking off of the artful motifs of others? Is The Goldfinch a Dickensian neo-classic or a childish attempt at a Pulitzer prize-winning yarn? Tartt’s novel has caused a lot of polarization, to say the least. Why did it split critics so?
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Room 53: Aggravation, Christ, and Congress [see previous post on the West]
—I saved you for last because you were the only one Thomas saw as a mentor and I think you complete the religious imagery that is there abut would have been more there if Eggers was religious and had a more religious agenda.
—I understand, son.
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Room48: Cannons, The West, and Dream Girls [see previous post on radicalization]
—I can see why you looked like his dream girl.
—Thanks?
—Not hitting on you. Just saying you’re an important character, an embodiment of an ideal.
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Room 60: Conspiracies, Bureucracies, and Hospital Mgt.
[see previous post on illiterate law enforcement]
—I brought you in for a topic that frustrates me as much as it does the protagonist.
—Fair enough.
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CALEB COY 