Wednesday, February 04, 2015

Wednesday "WOW Factor" Et. Al.


Congratulations to the Sandpoint High Lady Bulldogs and their coaches for one more outstanding effort last night.

After clinching their league title last week, the Lady Bulldogs made it a perfect record by defeating Lakeland in Rathdrum.  

And, even more impressive, the Bulldog standout at the right scored more points than Lakeland BY HERSELF.  

Madi Schoening broke a school record of 40 points, held by Bulldog great Alli Nieman since the mid'90s, by dropping in 49 points

What an achievement for her and her teammates! 

We're from Sandpoint, and we couldn't be any prouder!  Good luck, Lady Bulldogs at your district tournament next week!

Hard to top that news with anything else, and with the news worldwide not being so good this morning, Madi gives us another reason to celebrate one of the many great achievements which tend to slip beneath the radar.  

But by gollee, she made a headline in the regional newspaper, and you can read the sports brief here: http://www.nwprepsnow.com/stories/2015/feb/04/girls-basketball-sandpoints-madi-schoening-scores/

Happily, there's another "WOW" this morning, which I noticed held its own in headlines yesterday amidst the gruesome story from the Mideast and other unsavory happenings. 

Harper Lee has made millions of readers very happy and excited. I love the fact that she wrote another book which sat for all these years. 

Having taught and having loved teaching To Kill a Mockingbird to English students a few times during my career, I'm ecstatic to learn about her "sequel," written before her famous novel.  

This morning that news is just as muddled as who was really responsible for "the dumbest play ever" in Sunday's Super Bowl.  I guess I'll have to do a little more reading in the news items about the upcoming July release of Go Set a Watchman, because I'm still a little confused about the sequel coming beforehand.  

I'm sure Harper Lee will continue to "trend" enough in the news that I'll be able to satisfy my curiosity and find all the answers.  

For now, I can't help but think of one of the highlights of my teaching career when a brilliant young man named Jesse Harris put on a two-day oral book presentation featuring To Kill a Mockingbird.

The class and I loved every minute of the lengthy performance----unlike another report during another year about Gone With the Wind.  

As a quick aside, I must mention that this oral presentation took place over a period of three days in my English class back in the early 1980s.

The presenter meant well, and she really did a convincing job of proving to us that she had, indeed, read the book----every page of it. 

On the second day of her report, when students in the classroom started marking down how many times she used "an-a-way" as a transition, I began to encourage her to maybe speed it up a bit.

My encouragement fell on deaf ears.  She continued on and on and on and on, clear into a third day.  When that class hour began, I put my foot down and told her the report had to end today!  She complied, and, thank God, her windy story died down.

Well, when Jesse in the late '80s did his take on To Kill a Mockingbird, teacher and students sat on the edge of their seats in total amazement throughout. 

Jesse deftly re-enacted some major scenes within the story, taking on the roles of each character.  I've never seen anything like it, and, to this day, I wish we had filmed his presentation. 

My students loved the novel whenever I taught it----even one of my heavy metal fanatics Richard Duggan who took on Truman Capote's accent while reading aloud in class one day.

I can't even calculate how many times since those days that I've thought of the novel and its lessons about prejudging people without ever stepping one foot in their shoes.  

It will be great to see what happens with Scout as an adult and what direction the author takes us.  I have a feeling that the literary world may re-emerge big-time in popularity again as we await the release of the new novel and then debrief for days, months and years afterward.  

Thank you, Harper Lee for giving this gift to all who so loved Jem and Scout and Boo and Atticus and Tom Robinson. 

On that note, two WOWS in one day.  Pretty neat.  Happy Wednesday!

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

Thanks for your support! :)

Charity Schoening (proud momma)