Think back, for a minute. Were you a weird kid in high school?
Not weird-weird. Just shy and awkward, we mean.
What’s the one class you had, though, where all that was OK? You know: The one class where you could be you.
Was it English class? Yep, thought so.
That’s the class where you could get all that angst down on paper. The class where you could reinvent yourself, in essay form, on a daily basis.
For the past 25 years at Morgantown High School, that place has been Jenny Secreto’s Freshman Honors English classroom on the third floor.
In that room, you’ll blink at a rosy-fingered dawn in ancient Greece from “The Odyssey” while tasting the grit of dust from the Jim Crow streets of 1930s Alabama in “To Kill a Mockingbird.”
You’ll learn about persuasive essays, subject-verb agreements, the oxford comma (or not) and why thank-you notes — of the handwritten variety — still matter.
The latter is especially important to Secreto.
She’s acquired a passel of them over the years, from across town, across the country and across oceans — as the legions of MHS graduates who journeyed through her class went forth.
It’s not about ego, the teacher and card recipient said. It’s about the intellectual energy of the whole thing.
The students took the time to write. They remembered.
Thank-you notes and formal letters and all those things that are now staring at the taillights of social media are still a big part of her class, she said.
It’s so, because such things still make an impression, Secreto said.
Forget Facebook’s misspellings, grammar lapses and nonexistent punctuation, she said.
Same for Twitter and Instagram, she added. Emojis, she might be somewhat OK with, provided they aren’t overused.
It’s about critical thinking, critical listening and getting it all down, the teacher said.
Last week, Gavin Hall, who graduated from MHS in 2003, came back to his old school.
Hall went to work for Elon Musk, creating the Artificial Intelligence systems which run the “gigafactory” complexes that make the batteries for the Tesla, the electric car signature of Musk.
The AI designer was back in his hometown because of a homework assignment by Secreto. The teacher told the students to write a formal letter introducing themselves and their school to a personality or company of choice.
A quartet of students wanted to write to Musk. Secreto told them to include a less-formal P.S.: “Tell Gavin Hall we said hello.”
The letters landed on Musk’s desk, who summoned Hall to his office.
“Guess who I just heard from?” Hall’s boss asked.
“That was fun,” Secreto said. Such communication, she said, can really make one mindful of spelling and syntax.
A lot of exercises in her class aren’t designed to be “fun,” necessarily, she said, but all are meaningful.
Such as the assigned reading of “To Kill a Mockingbird,” Harper Lee’s parable of race, racism and redemption.
“Atticus Finch knew he wasn’t going to win that case,” the teacher said. “But he took it because it was the right thing to do.”
Call that courage and compassion, Secreto said.
And words on a page, come to life.
It’s even more so, she said, in the age of George Floyd and Ahmaud Arbery.
“We’re doing lots of talking about it.”
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