Thanks, Emily: Thoughts on Revisiting Our Town

By Coleen Armstrong

I hadn’t even glanced at Thornton Wilder’s Pulitzer Prize-winning play in well over a decade––but since I’d been assigned a class of 11th graders and was beginning a new unit, I thumbed hurriedly through the American Lit textbook to find the section on drama. I scanned the stage manager’s familiar, opening lines and smiled in recognition. But after reading only five pages, I was stunned to find my throat closing and my eyes misting.

The following day, I confessed to my class that I’d sat up late, rereading the entire thing. Then I warned them that once, long ago, this play had literally transformed my life––and that the same thing would probably happen to them.

They stared at me.

I’d been 16, a high school junior myself, captivated by Wilder’s chronicle of everyday existence in 1901 Grovers Corners, New Hampshire. The setting had struck an instant chord. My grandmother had died a year earlier, and I now treasured more than ever her vivid, detailed stories of a girlhood on a southern Ohio farm in the 1890s. Over time I’d grown to feel as if I knew her family well––mother, father, two sisters, one brother. Now that she was gone, it seemed as if I’d lost the others too.

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IN THIS ISSUE:

Lessons from Our Town

RAPSA Lounge

News & Views

“Write about an episode in your life which at the time didn’t seem particularly memorable or impactive––but later on, when your life’s circumstances had altered, it became a singularly beautiful and cherished moment.”

–Coleen Armstrong

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News & Views

Program boosting district’s scores
Low achievers with ‘potential’ targeted

By Bruce Lieberman, San Diego Union Tribune, September 13, 2009

SAN MARCOS — There's not a minute wasted in Michelle Petitte's eighth-grade humanities class. The 13- and 14-year-olds in her classroom at Woodland Park Middle School are guided efficiently from task to task.

“What were the two things that landed you in this special humanities class? Bad grades and bad test scores,” Petitte tells her students in a no-nonsense tone that tells a lot about her approach to teaching.