By: Timothy Dolan, Advisor
Following the rousing success of Bedford High School’s spring musical Mean Girls, an investigation was opened into rumors that the faculty of the English Department has started their own “Burn Book.”
10th grader Emma Cohen brought the issue to the attention of her guidance counselor Khunravy Say after receiving a note scrawled in red pen. “It was just so mean and uncalled for,” she explained. “I don’t know why anyone would write that, I always italicize text titles.”
A few others noticed similar comments. “I was just walking toward the recycling bin with some assignments that Ms. Kane had handed back, and I noticed ‘use slashes to delineate lines of poetry’ written across the top of an essay. It’s like someone has been reading my private (yet shared via Google Docs) writing or something” said sophomore Lauren Perales.
Another student, Mila Maricic, was similarly spooked after finding “You need to include page numbers in citations” cleanly printed in the margin of a recent assignment. “I try to keep my sources to myself, it feels like an invasion of privacy for them to be so public,” she explained. “I feel so exposed and I’m not really sure how to cope.”
Things escalated when the feedback jumped from Ms. Kane’s class to Ms. Cigna’s like some kind of grammatical contagion. 10th grader Asalie Brosgol has been reevaluating her social standing after a call to “consistently capitalize proper nouns.” The girls spring track team even scratched ‘asalie brosgol doesn’t capitalize her proper nouns” across three lockers with a rusty stylus, and encouraged coach Rich Donnelly to make her run all four legs of the 4 x 800m relay as penance.
At that point, English Program Administrator Kelsey McCarthy called all sophomore girls to the LGI before asking, “We’re all here because of this feedback right? Do any of you know who’s been writing all these comments on your essays?”
After several minutes of that awkward silence that ensues whenever an adult asks a question to a room full of teenagers, Emma Cohen tepidly raised her hand and said, “I think it might be my English teacher?”
“Good, now we’re getting somewhere,” McCarthy replied.
