A Week In The Life Of A High School

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There is an excellent education lurking here for the child with an inner flashlight. The best teachers arrive early and leave late and wrestle to make everything they teach mean something, and they all show up at the football game at the end of the week, their own kids in tow, cheering their students on and mixing and meddling with their lives in the bleachers. Walk down the halls, stop and listen in, and you can hear those moments of collision and discovery. "Some of you were complaining that the questions I was asking about The Scarlet Letter were making your brains hurt," says David Mendelson to his honors English class. "That is the goal." He is trying to take them to the point where their heads throb, because that is the point at which they learn. "If the question is easy, I have failed." Maybe high school is supposed to hurt some. That is also why we remember what happens here forever--all the triumphs and all the scars, all the effort to tell which is which.

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