Friday, November 20, 2015

"Being Loved" by July 3rd

Love and being loved is not the same thing…
Love is stability, support, and comfort
Love is letting go of your fears
Love is being willing to risk it all
Love is unsure, a mystery that captures you
Love isn’t always what you want it to be
Love has no boundaries, makes no sense
Being loved is letting a sharp needle dangle above you, accepting all consequences
And if it drops on you, love is the only thing that can heal your pain.
Being loved is a body of water that you can’t sink in
Being loved is a tree that grows leaves in the winter
Being loved is a sun ray that pierces your skin and calms your soul
Being loved is the difference between nervous and excited
Being loved is feeling home in another country.

Being loved is a feeling you can't explain in words.

"The Last Day" by Megatron

Bang! The sound the locker makes as it's slammed shut. "Don't run!" The teachers yell. It's the start of summer and the last day of school. Friends giggle at inside jokes and teachers sigh at relief of not having to grade essays, clearly typed last minute. The loud speaker makes a shrieking noise before announcements are made. Principal Bates addresses the entire school. "Good afternoon Herndon Hornets! Let me be the first to wish you a happy summer. Please remember to be safe and most of all have fun! As a Herndon Hornet, we expect you stay on top of summer assignments. Please enjoy your summers and we look forward to seeing you next fall!" Another shrieking noise is made at the close of the speaker. 3,2,1! Ding! The bell sounds off a stampede of students into the summer. I take my time walking down the halls. Now empty, I try to remember the paint color, the floors, the smell and everything I look at. I think to myself... "This is my last time here." Sadness rushes through my heart as memories of friendships go through my mind. Times of great lessons I'll take with me. Memories of teachers who impacted me I'll cherish forever. Farewell, Herndon High School.

Friday, November 13, 2015

Haiku Cake Day 2015: Teacher Haiku

On Thursday, 11/12, we hosted our second annual Haiku Cake Party! Student haiku and photos will be posted in the next week, but in the meantime, here are some haiku submitted by HHS Teachers!

They are all meekness
A teacher is a good god
Some oddity thing
-Ms. LaForest (ESOL)
Note: This haiku is a found haiku from one of Ms. LaForest's student's writings. The original is pictured below.




Drop out of grad school
Stand on roadway with the sign:
"Will Haiku for Cake"
- Mr. Keay (English)

Haiku is the best!
I can’t believe I’ll miss this.
Red days only--sigh.
-Ms. Breza (Tech Ed)

Who's the best teacher?
He's in Room Two Thirty One
His name is Carag
- Mr. Carag (ESOL)

I really like books.
They  make me very happy.
Yes, you should read, too!
-Ms. Corsino (English)

Green tea aroma
Buffering winter's hard grip
inhaling spring's promise
- Ms. Danies (ESOL)

Good god, I'm tired.
8th period was rowdy.
I need cake, please! Please!
-Mr. Hutton (ESOL)

I like to eat cake.
Cake is my favorite food.
Please give me some cake.
-Mr. Butterfield (ESOL)

The Writing Center's
Thursday haiku and cake means
Tasty poetry!
-Our lovely librarians

Some people say that
Cake is all that. But I say
There's nothing like pie.
-Ms. Jewell (English)

What's in my pocket?
Perhaps some forgotten cash?!
Nope. Just dryer lint. :\
-Ms. Atallah (English)

Iced coffee is the best
Like vacation in a cup
Eternal summer
-Ms. Hutton (English)


“The Fight of the Ink” by El Manco

‘’It’s easy to know what you want to say, but not to say it”-Mario Vargas Llosa

In the everyday life I get involved in many different situations and with completely different people that without any expectation we have to face. When that’s happening people never get to really say what they were thinking but get a big frustration instead. It literally happens after every confrontation or fight that somebody had. Once I leave the “battlefield” is when a round of thought runs through my mind about what I could really have said while confronting the other person and but at that point all left there is to keep walking away.

That is the main reason why I started writing, because I never got to say what I truly felt or what I was actually thinking in the middle of a dispute or confrontation. I write when I think something is being unfair in my life. Any frustrations and desires I have I put them down in the simplicity but comfortableness of a paper.

I would classify myself as a very shy person. It costs me a lot to talk to people sometimes and I’d rather be on the side listening to conversations instead of being part of them, and when I write it is like having a full conversation with paper. It feels safe and I pour out all I have to say to the world on my piece of paper drawn with ink.
Mainly how I start my process of writing is really strange. Usually when it’s a free writing assignment I let my emotions talk for me. I get mad really easy for no reason. I’m upset almost all the time and literally my only medicine or what calms me down is writing in a piece of paper. I let the rage take possession of my hand and start drawing my thoughts in a really disorganized way. I first have to let everything out without holding back , it’s like a waterfall , when its descending is strong , really powerful but once it touches the lagoon it gets calm and starts going with the flow. And once I finish I throw everything I have into myself to the paper I start to give it shape and sense so the audience would understand what I am writing about.

One of my biggest struggles is when the prompt or the assignment that I have to write about does not get to me, like I do not feel like writing it because I just don’t feel identified with it .When I write, I do it because I like it and because I need to feel the necessity and passion to do it. Otherwise I would write some words that don’t make any sense. In this case I would mostly try to get myself involved in a situation where I could be able to understand the prompt and when I get to do it I would write about my own experience. As an example, if the prompt is “You realize you have inadvertently become a stalker.” And I don’t really know how being a stalker feels like nor what is even a stalker, I would look the definition up and then even if its sounds creepy I would stalk somebody randomly and once I get to the point where I got the idea of what the prompt is about I start writing about it.

I have my days where my mind becomes a piece of wood, no thoughts, no feeling, no consciousness and that’s one of my weakness as a writer because when I am in those days I find it strongly hard to go back in the game. In this situation I don’t really know what to do. I kind of wait until something happens to me that can fuel my desire to write anything, a tragedy or if I see a girl that I think is really beautiful ,those thoughts can become hopefully poetry or sonnets . I used to be an old school guy that frequently would write letters of love to every girl I found attractive and if I get to the point where I had to ask the girl out or if I have to confess my “love “for her I would write a lot of poems to try to explain myself, and how much it would mean to me if they could consent me the honor of being my date. But eventually times changed and girls wouldn’t find it romantic but cowardly instead which make me feel disappointment not towards myself, but to the destruction of such a beautiful art of cortege.


In conclusion, I write because is the only way of art that I’m aware of, the need of crying out what I really have to say to the world is fed continuously when I’m writing, and like many writers say, it is really hard to start writing but once you pass the wall everything becomes much easier, I like to drown in my writing until my desire is fulfilled. Until then I would keep taking my mind and putting it to my piece of paper. I write because I am not able to win a fist fight, but I might bring down countries with a single pen, one paper and feeling locked up on the deepest part of my conscience.

"The Music of Writing" by WhyCough

 Gustave Flaubert once said, “I am irritated by my own writing. I am like a violinist whose ear is true, but whose fingers refuse to reproduce precisely the sound he hears within.” Frequently, this is how I approach my writing; I know what I feel and I can see the words painting pictures in my head, but they never seem to correctly decipher from internal thoughts to external pages. This has happened since the beginning of my relationship with writing.

In my early years, my mother was a librarian, so she spent much of her time planting me in gardens of books and watering me with words so I might grow to love ink and paper like she did. She succeeded. As a child, I was endlessly reading whenever I could find the time: during class, before sports practices, during dinner. Because of this premature passion for words, I became just that- “a violinist whose ear is true.” I was aware of all the ingredients that melded together to form a good story. To me, in writing, there was a canyon between right and wrong, light and dark, beauty and imitation, and I found it within myself to desperately try and recreate the allure I found reading my favorite texts.

As a result of this, when I started writing, I became my own biggest critic. It was a perpetual cycle: I would write a sentence, stare at it, dismiss it as trash, then delete it. The process I endured could be described flawlessly in one word: frustrating. My expectations for perfection stifled my ability to compose. The never ending battle between who I am and who I should be as a writer was suffocating. To this day, I still wrestle with these chains of excellence. As Voltaire said, “the best is the enemy of the good,” and I have learned that I need to be able to completely unleash my thoughts uncensored and unedited without worrying about their exact quality that I envisioned. Through this, I am able to actually produce work, instead of being smothered by mulling over insignificant details.

Sometimes, words lose their meaning once they begin the journey from the head to the pencil. Frequently, there is mistranslation. It worries me that, like the violinist struggling to reproduce their inner cacophony, I will be unable to fully duplicate my thoughts. In my opinion, there is always a sense of beauty that is lost when attempting to put phrases to a feeling. Writing is enchanting, but from time to time, pure wordlessness is the greatest magic of all, because it means that there is part of the human experience that can’t be computed, digitalized, or understood. Some things can’t be watered down to letters on a page.


Despite this, writers have the hardest job: trying to make the intangible something we can touch.

Friday, November 6, 2015

"The Power of Words in a Lonely Existence" by Jinxx Clark

A girl sits alone in the corner of an elementary school blacktop. Hair as dark as the night, short, and unruly. Looking down at a notebook that rested upon her criss-cross knees, hair fell into her face and casted shadows across her rounded cheeks. Even through those shadows her eyes still glowed as white-blue as the stars. Children danced around the blacktop and nearby playground, smiling, laughing, living. They danced around her, avoiding her except to stop and taunt or laugh in her face every once in awhile. She smiled at them sometimes, other times she was too far into her notebook to completely notice them. In her head, all the sounds of her surroundings were quieted, as if cotton had been stuck in her ears, and stories played out like a movie in front of her eyes. Each press of her pen to paper created a new tale, a new drawing, a new story.

Dragons, and fairies, knights, superheroes, leprechauns, and gremlins. Castles, oceans, lands, seas, mansions, and small villages. Magic, quests, missions, saving people, and battling for a new sense of freedom. All of it existed on the paper, and all of it existed in her head. It mattered not that she was sitting alone, because she wasn’t alone, not truly.

In a place where there are words, no one can be alone. In a place where you have the power to imagine, and create, and laugh in the face of danger, or smile at those that taunt you, you can never ever be alone.

A girl sits in a college lecture hall, listening with a smile as the professor reads out her newly published words. Her starry eyes gleam with joy as the people around her gasp and laugh along with the tale. Her hair falls into face as she attempt to hide her large smile and reddening cheeks. She can see it all in front of her, every single word making the tale come back to her mind as fresh as the day she first wrote it. She gets shoved back to reality as the people around her pat her on the back and the room explodes in claps. “You’re going to be the new Shakespeare or something!” someone calls out. She smiles at them.


The words had finally done their work, and it was with words that she would always feel at home. It was those words that had brought her to be somewhere where dreams could become realities.

"After the Fact" by C.T. Ruth

As I drive through the winding roads insecurities flush my face
"What if I was wrong" is a question that seems to bounce off the rocky mountains surrounding me
You said "things would be different if"
I think of exchanges we shared and the way your face scrunched up when you laughed
You remind me of the good and well and new
"But" my head yearns
I can not be yours
I can not live chasing after "if only"s

My mind drifts as the road dives deeper toward the foot of the mountains and your smile fades into thoughts of what is ahead.

Thursday, November 5, 2015

The HWC at CAPTA 2015

On October 2, 2015, 19 HWC tutors, along with Directors Mrs. Jewell, Mrs. Hutton, and Ms. Atallah and HHS Administrators Mr. Bates and Mr. Barr, attended the Capital Area Peer Tutoring Association's 2015 conference, CAPTA Connects. Below is a video about the day. We had an awesome time!


"Ivy League School" by Monica Cody

When I was a young child, I knew that I wanted to go to Harvard. To study what, I don’t know. I barely knew what Harvard was, other than th...