650 Words

MORGAN OBERSTEIN graduated from high school in 2008.  A thoughtful reader and sharp writer, she aced my AP Language and Composition class as a junior.  One thing I will always remember:  she and some friends came back during their senior year and won the schoolwide Jeopardy Tournament (see pic below; she is second from left).   From high school Morgan went to UCLA, played lacrosse, majored in Sociology and Global Studies all the while doing her prerequisites for chiropractic school. Then she moved up to the Bay Area for chiropractic school, graduated, opened up a practice from scratch with her now fiancé, where she specializes in providing care for pregnant women and kids.  She also coaches (and still plays) lacrosse and runs a non-profit focused on bringing natural healthcare to underserved populations.  In her post here, she taps her 18-year-old self on the shoulder and shares a few things with her.  “My post is about a few thi...

Molly Morrison was one of those notorious Class of 2013 kids. I was lucky enough to have her in class for two years, during which time she wrote a wide assortment of chatty and charming pieces about every topic under the sun (including an epic essay that compared Cormac McCarthy's Blood Meridian with the film Platoon). "My English classes at Parker transformed my resistance of classroom reading into a restless curiosity about the world these writers seemed to grapple with," she said. Molly went on to Loyola University Chicago and graduated in May 2017 with a degree in Business Management and Journalism. She currently lives in Chicago and works for an international recruiting agency that focuses on staffing STEM industries. If you read Molly’s post and want to talk about Chicago, college, or life, you should reach out to her. She’s cool. In this post, Molly writes about " the general sense of directionless floating a lot of high school grads and college ...

I should begin by simply answering the question in the title of this post:  it is a blog started in the summer of 2018 that seeks to provide a repository for retrospective writing about the high school experience.  The target audience is the high school student; the majority of writers are slightly older young people offering advice about how to survive high school “with your soul intact.”  The title, 650 Words, is a reference to the maximum length of the Common App college essay, the real or false statement of identity that sits at the end of the high school journey. But let me backtrack a little and explain its origins. The idea for this blog came to me while I was on one of my summer walks. August morning, second mile, headphones in, listening to the post-rock instrumental compilation that serves as a soundtrack for my thinking (Explosions in the Sky, Red Sparowes, and my favorite, Lights and Motion.) As an English teacher who gets two-and-a-half month...