SCHOOL PHONE/E-MAIL:
973 226-0660 x61 hjackson@msdacademy.org
I am an enthusiast for my subject and for the art of teaching and I believe
that students at The Mount have the opportunity to become "educated women."
"It has always seemed strange to me that in our endless discussions about
education so little stress is laid on the pleasure of becoming an educated
person, the enormous interest it adds to life. To be able to be caught up
into the world of thought - that is to be educated!" - Edith Hamilton
A Note to Students and Parents:
When noted professor and literary critic Harold Bloom was asked in an
interview, “What can people get from reading that they can't from movies or
television?” he replied:
“I would say not less than everything. You can get a great deal of
information, as such, from screens of one sort or another. You can dazzle
yourself with images, if that is your desire. But how you are to grow in
self-knowledge, become more introspective, discover the authentic treasures
of insight and of compassion and of spiritual discernment and of a deep bond
to other solitary individuals? How in fact can like call out to like without
reading, I do not know. I suppose if I were to put it in almost a common
denominator sort of way, I would say that you cannot even begin to heal the
worst aspects of solitude, which are loneliness and potential madness, by
visual experience of any kind, particularly the sort of mediated visual
experience that you get off a screen of whatever sort. If you are to really
encounter a human otherness which finds an answering chorus in yourself,
which can become an answering chorus to your own sense of inward isolation,
there truly is no authentic place to turn except to a book.”
Indeed, as Hector from “The History Boys” tells Posner:
“The best moments in reading are when you come across something - a thought,
a feeling, a way of looking at things - that you'd thought special,
particular to you. And here it is, set down by someone else, a person you've
never met, maybe even someone long dead. And it's as if a hand has come out,
and taken yours.”
My goal is to inspire my students to READ LITERATURE.
Mrs. Jackson