Hamlet, Tao, Mel Brooks

I had a lot of fun preparing for the presentation I did in class this past monday. Like I mentioned I have always had a strong interest in history, especially in that section of the world. I remember little things the teacher Petrigno used to do to help us learn better, and they were amazing. When we did the Ottoman conquest of Byzantium, he played the song "Istanbul was Constantinople" by They Might be Giants. Or when we learned about Michelangelo painting the Sistine Chapel he had us all take pen and paper and crawl under our desks, hold the paper up to the bottom of the desk, and draw anything for a whole class period. When it was over he asked us to imagine what that would feel like if we did it for almost a decade, or however long it was. Also the fact that he painted it with only like a few candles. He used Mel Brooks History of the World to teach us about the Inquisition, and a million other little things that it would take a while to mention. That class along with my philosophy class, and senior english were the only three classes I ever liked in highschool. Everything else was useless crap that I just didn't care about. That's why I failed so many classes in highschool and didn't get accepted to any colleges at first. I spent the majority of my time just hanging out in the courtyard playing guitar and doing handstands all the time. My philosophy class was probably the single most important class. We did a chronological survey of western philosophy, and then we through in a little Dao at the end. We also did an aesthetical/ethical debate looking at people like Mapplethorpe, which is pretty progressive for highschool. He was this pragmatic rock, and he taught me so much. Nothing fazed him ever, or at least it seemed. He never became involved in the politics of education, yet he was continually elected teacher of the year and other awards. The other class that I loved was senior English, and this is one of the reasons I became an English major. I didn't like the majority of what we did all year in the class, mainly Shakespeare stuff. But there came a time near the end of the year, when we started Hamlet, and that is when everything changed. Hamlet was probably the only thing I was ever forced to read in highschool that ever spoke to me. I was your typical tortured teen, and everything I read in those pages just resonated with me. I still remember many quotes that I used to put on notebooks and into my livejournal. "There is special providence in the fall of a sparrow", "Oh that this too, too sullied flesh would melt", "One may smile and yet be a villain", and of the course the famed passage which contains The ultimate question. I don't know...Hamlet, the Tao, and Mel Brooks is what I remember from highschool.