Featured Academic News of the Week

February 24, 2023
Mr. David Gallagher, English Teacher

Here are a few highlights in English classes over the past few weeks.

In fifth grade we are about halfway through Holes, a 1998 young adult mystery comedy novel written by Louis Sachar. The protagonist, Stanley Yelnats, is under a curse that began with his great-great-grandfather and has followed the family since then. Stanley has been sent to a boys’ detention center where the boys build character by spending all day digging holes exactly five feet wide and five feet deep. There is no lake at Camp Green Lake. But there are an awful lot of holes, thus the title. 

In middle school, we are just finishing up the Rod Serling teleplay, “The Monsters are Due on Maple St,” which was written and performed for the television show “The Twilight Zone,” in 1960. The teleplay shows how easily society can tear itself apart when people are afraid and suspicious of one another. It begins on Main Street, U.S.A. and ends as a paranoid, out-of-control mob.

In high school, our freshman and sophomores just finished writing an argumentative essay about the novel, The Lord of the Flies, written in 1954 by the Nobel Prize-winning British author William Golding.  Students presented written arguments designed to persuade readers who or what was responsible for the demise of society on the island where a group of young British boys are stranded. 

Finally, in British Literature, we are wrapping up 1984, George Orwell’s dystopian masterpiece, published in 1949. The iconic English novelist and social critic writes about the risks of government overreach, totalitarianism and repression of all persons and behaviors within society.