My Nonprofit Reviews

Last year, during the collaborative short story unit that Telluride Mountain School humanities team runs every year, something clicked for an upper school student. A story about his childhood poured out of him—it was funny, sweet, sad, poignant, and our judges, a group of local writers, selected his story for one of the top prizes. Since then, he’s been on fire; not only about creative writing but about everything; he is literally getting straight A’s.

In our honor’s group, he asked if we could please learn more grammar because he can’t stand when he reads something and doesn’t understand how to use it in his own writing. So, in addition to Madame Bovary, we ended up talking about the “em dash” for twenty minutes. In our regular English section, he’s come to me with easily ten drafts of his Hamlet paper, saying that he’s just so tired of writing overly simplistic literary papers. Every time he comes to find me or sends me a new email, he apologizes—“I’m so sorry to bug you again but….” and every time, I assure him that he’s not bugging me and we go through another draft. As a result, he now has a 3-part thesis on the corruption in the play and how it manifests in the “To Be or Not to Be” speech.