Journalists and advertisers typically portray American high school students as slackers who just play video games and overuse the word “like.” A study recently published by the National Governors’ Association shows why some assumptions about high school students are shortsighted and inaccurate, however. And the study’s alarming conclusion—which won’t strike students as all that surprising—places the blame for problems in high school education on the schools, not the students.
A tradition in New York City’s Lower East Side, Shakespeare in the Parking Lot returned for its eleventh summer in June. This summer, the Ludlow Ten performed The Taming of the Shrew. The, err, lively backdrop—replete with senile neighbors, honking buses and screaming children—was much better suited to a comedy than, say, Richard III, which apparently ran earlier in the season.
When I first saw the poster for Tim Burton and Johnny Depp’s Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, I winced. Although I trust them both, the 1971 version was almost perfect. It wasn’t hard to imagine a big budget disappointment on par with Tim Burton’s other remake, Planet of the Apes.
On the other hand, Charlie and the Chocolate Factory is a story custom made for this director. Tim Burton has always excelled at finding terror in cutesiness. And vice versa. More than that, every one of his movies has devoted itself to one subject: The Outsider. Roald Dahl’s books about Willy Wonka and his chocolate factory concern themselves with both of these things. It is especially interesting that Tim Burton would tell this story at this point in his career.
I was fourteen when Kurt Cobain died. I was in a San Bernardino Holiday Inn, watching MTV with the shades drawn while my Odyssey of the Mind teammates splashed around in the sickly blue hotel pool. I was having bad allergies that spring, and besides—there were some word problems I wanted to go over before the semifinals on Sunday.
Suffice it to say that, in 1994, I was about as un-rock-and-roll as an eighth grader could possibly get. But when Kurt Loder came up on my TV screen with a special news update, saying that the lead singer of Nirvana had been found dead in the guesthouse over his garage, I knew that something major had just taken place.
“What are all these people lined up for?” passersby asked me again and again this past Friday evening. A line of people stretched up the block and grew longer and longer until it wrapped around the corner all the way down to the next street over. An excited energy buzzed through the crowd, some of whom had arrived up to six hours early to secure their spots. Were they there to meet someone famous? To buy tickets for a concert? No, they were waiting for the midnight release of the sixth book in the Harry Potter series!
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