Fin.

It was. And I was. These are the phrases, of which I will use both, that will guide my reflection on English, on Millbrook, on the past, and on the future.

It Was:

It was the best of times, it was the worst of times. How could I possibly generalize the ups and downs of my high school experience? There were plenty of times in the past four years where I felt overwhelmed by work and alone in my academic journey, but I like to think there were equally many times spent laughing with friends and happily bettering myself. It was a time where I feel I made a tangible transition from a boy to a man. I have not only gained forty pounds and a few inches since freshman year, I feel as if I have gotten smarter and more decisive. It was a lot of things good and bad, but all of it was and is now the past. Each day marks one less that I will be around the same people at the same school doing the same things, which can feel like a relief at times. But I am not immune to the human characteristic of being a creature of habit, and I feel like I have grown into my expectations and my surroundings.
Walking across the impersonal stage in an arena not built for me is a proverbial ripping off the band-aid and forced ascension to the next tier of education, but it means so much more than that to myself and many others. It was a lot of things I will leave behind, and a lot I will take with me. I started my time at Millbrook High School taking paideia with Mrs. Genesky and Mr. Grow, and I will finish my time taking classes from both of them. A kind of poetic end to an experience whose life lessons I won't completely understand until much further down the road.
It was something I am incredibly thankful for, I know there are so many people who have invested their time and efforts into my success, and that I am not an island. I couldn't have made it to where I am sitting today without help from my teachers and coaches, as well as some facets of the Millbrook community I will never meet and can never thank properly. It was so much that a paragraph, a page, or even a novella couldn't cover it. It was four years, it was too little of some, it was too much of others, and in the end it was so much more than I can explain.

I was:

I was new. I was young. I was excited. I was afraid. I was so many things the first day of high school. One thing I wasn't was well dressed. I spent more time worrying about my outfit than any of my classes, but I still managed to mess that up. What should I wear? Who should I be? I went with a red Hawaiian shirt, blue board shorts, and floral Vans. I was ready to make a good impression on my peers and on my teachers. I was ready to learn and I was ready to make friends. I was unaware of how much I'd grow and change and how much my opinions, personality, and friend groups would change. I was prepared and I was unprepared. Do I contradict myself? Very well then I contradict myself, (I am large, I contain multitudes.) I was myself then, and I am myself now, even if those two people dress differently and look different. I was goal oriented, I was strong willed, I was unafraid of challenges, and I am still all of those things. I was not beaten down and deterred from hard times spent working but rather molded into the student and person I am today because of it. I was young, and now I am older. I was many things then and I am many things now. I was many things, and I will adopt many more along my next four years of school and my throughout the rest of my life. I have so much more ahead of me, but I have also left so much behind. I hope that I will have left my mark on Millbrook in some way, and I know that I might not ever find out if this hope is met. All I can say is that my experience has left its mark on me.

Thank you to:

Thank you to all of the people I have not once met, but who have supported my education and classroom environments through your efforts.
Thank you to all of the teachers who truly cared about what they taught and made me care, too.
Thank you to all of my friends who were there for me when I needed them.
Thank you to my family for supporting me and loving me, even when I was tough to be around.
Thank you to Coach Hostler, who helped me become the athlete and man I am today.
Thank you Mr. Grow for loving the past and caring about the present, I have had you three times throughout my schooling experience at Millbrook, each for vastly different classes and your passion for teaching did not wax or wane in any of them.
Thank you to Ms. Romano for creating a fun and safe environment for us to learn, discuss, and escape from the intensity of our other classes.
Thank you to Mr. Baron for pushing us and being the bad guy sometimes, you clearly care about us and are willing to be the tough love we all need.
And thank you lastly but not lastly but not leastly Mrs. Genesky. You are the only teacher I know who could make Macbeth riveting and who could make a room full of busy teenagers laugh, learn and work. I frankly don't care who they decide to make teacher of the year for the state, because you have already won in my mind.  I am so lucky to have had you twice in my Millbrook career and hope my brother Griffin is just as lucky. You have helped me so much along the way and one sappy blog post isn't really enough to cover it, but I'll try anyways. Thank you so much.

Walt Whitman the Always lit Man

This blog on America's 'Good Grey Poet' begins with my examinations of Walt's personal notebook and my response, and is followed by my response to.

Walt's Notebook:

My initial reaction to seeing the contents of Whitman's notebook was holy crap. This is because one of the most cohesive and legible transcendentalist authors has such a disorganized and jumbled notebook. After my initial reaction faded, I realized it was not altogether atypical of an artist or writer to have jumbled personal thoughts that seem to make little sense to a reader. Part of having a personal notebook is that it is just that, personal, and Whitman's scribbled notes made sense to him. My next thought was to look past the formatting difficulties and try to find content that was more revealing about Walt himself. Many of the lines of prose are appear to be thought of on the go, and Walt has written them down in apparent way to remember them for later works. One line stood out to me because it seems to stray from the pattern of lines written for poems, Walt wrote "I want to see what ? before I die" on one of the later journal pages. This line stands out to me because it brings home the point that Walt was approaching the end of his life while compiling the Leaves of Grass. The drawings also interested me because of their apt portraiture. Walt including drawings in his notebook characterizes him as artistic but also interested in the human form. All drawings but one are of a male face, and the drawing that is an exception to this rule strays far from the others. On the last page of a notebook there is a depiction of a skeleton with curly hair, a three point hat, and a large sword through its heart standing on a beach with its arms in a shrugging position. This sketch could symbolize death or the loss of love, but it is not exactly clear to me why Walt would include this drawing in his personal notebook. Walt Whitman's inner thoughts appear to characterize him as a dedicated poet and an all around artist who concerned himself with the issue of his own mortality and of humanity.

New York Times analysis of Walt's Notebook:

The New York Times sought out to provide an insightful commentary on the inner thoughts of Walt Whitman, of which they did incredibly well. The first yellow note describes the names and addresses of the people Walt Whitman wrote down to remember, a fact that seems altogether less significant. The New York Times then dropped a bombshell about something I failed to notice, that Walt Whitman's notebook began an imaginary dialogue between himself and Abraham Lincoln. Whitman then goes on to discuss religion, liberty, and the dissolving of the Union during the Civil War. Whitman's writings on these topics, snippets of a conversation he never had, are of profound significance as far as context for his later work such as Drum Taps. After the conclusion of his passage Libertad, Whitman begins Ship of State a direct assessment of 'President-elect' Abraham Lincoln's capabilities. Whitman states that "any body can sail with a fair wind, or a smooth sea" implicitly referring to Lincoln's difficult position as captain of the ship in metaphorical rough seas. Whitman then calls out "Blow mad winds!" as a way of saying that circumstance could test Lincoln and liberty itself, but he believed that Abraham Lincoln and the United States could weather the challenges. The New York Times also informed me that the sketches are likely portraits of Whitman drawn by someone else and not original works of his.

Conclusion:

Overall, the in-depth New York Times analysis provided me with a much deeper understanding of Whitman's notebook than my surface level observation of its pages. It is clear through my own assessment and that of the New York Times that Walt Whitman was in fact large and contained multitudes. On one hand, his personal life was going through a midlife crisis, but on the other hand Whitman was a joyful man who viewed America's future with optimism. Even though Whitman assessed the waters Lincoln would navigate to be rough, he had faith in Lincoln's ability to preserve liberty in the United States. Whitman proved himself to be a complicated, but still immensely likable author with the personal thoughts in his journal.