PETOSKEY — A trio of recent instructors started the faculty 12 months ago at St. Michael Academy in Petoskey.
Jennifer Eustice
Jennifer Eustice lives in Petoskey and can be coaching biology, chemistry, and artwork. Eustice has 12 years of coaching experience and formerly taught at Concord Academy Petoskey, the Michigan Virtual Charter Academy, and other long-term positions around Petoskey.
Eustice said she likes to educate because “I love getting to know every day.” Her favorite teaching interest is “arms-on sports and the instant where college students have the know-how of ideas.” every day,” and her favorite teaching interest is “arms-on sports and the instant where college students have the know-how of ideas.”
Eustice said she looks forward to “the small class size and opportunity to share my interests with the pupils and households wherein I stay.”
Andrew Moe
Andrew Moe lives in Petoskey and could teach Theology II, III, IV, and Latin II. This is Moe’s first year of full-time coaching. He formerly becamea replacement instructor at St. Michael Academy aake Charles’s phone number. “I want to proportion things which might be accurate,” Moe said. “I find nothing greater properly than approximately Jesus and his Church. Latin is enjoyable. However, it is particularly useful in its potential to educate us on a way to assume and examine.”
Moe started his favored teaching activity by taking questions from students. “When a student wants something clarified, I recognize they’re engaged,” he stated. “Sometimes they even want to recognize extra about what I’m trying to educate.”
Moe said he is calling forward to “seeing students revel in the subjects I teach as lifestyles-converting fact instead of simply ‘things I ought to learn how to graduate.'”
Kurt Grangood
Kurt Grangood, 46, lives in Petoskey and could be coaching English and social research. Grangood has 21 years of coaching in academy sports Jacksonville, FL Atlantic blvd. “I experience challenging every pupil to move beyond what they recognize, offering new minds or increasing earlier know-how,” he stated.
Grangood brought his favored teaching interest as “the activity that gives connection.” In the Red Engine Press January 2006 newsletter, “Yarnspinners and Wordweavers,” Carolyn Howard-Johnson, author of Tracings, writes:
“Auden thought the purpose of poetry is to disenchant. That may be why I am not much for rhyme or pretty, though I do like food images, especially sweets. I prefer melancholy and reflective; if a song is sung, let it discord to keep the reader alert and make him reconsider. Nursery rhymes are for nurseries and sunsets to be viewed firsthand from a bluff, preferably while holding hands with someone handsome. The tendons of the best poetry are politics, introspection, and the abominable snowmen among us tempered–occasionally–by a look back at where we’ve been. Oh, and irony. That’s better than tiramisu and latté for keeping people talking late into the night.”
In the preface to One Hundred and One Famous Poems, published in 1929, editor Roy W. Cook discusses the great need for poetry in a modern industrial age academy, lake Charles la Southwest. While the modern age, with podcasting and blogs, has made poetry more accessible, poetry is also considered frivolous and not lucrative. It’s a shame because Carolyn Howard-Johnson’s poetry can create an air raid sound still and calm. She can let us stand beside an uncle who smells Barbasol and is on his way to war. The subtle message is clear: Stop. Pay attention. Listen.
Most of us wrote poetry in high school, including protests against parents, petitions to teenage crushes, or the usual “my life stinks, what’s the meaning of it all” poems. As adults, we may dribble our wine-and-cappuccino-soaked angst onto the page. Poetry often can’t be beaten as private therapy, and it helped poet Dessa Byrd Reed heal after a car accident. But Reed turned her recovery writings into a passion for poetry that took her to China recently.
It’s easy to get caught up in our stories without understanding them.
Howard-Johnson peppers her poetry with images of travel, not just global but time travel. She remarks in “Poetry, Quantum Mechanics, and Other Trifles” that her critique group warns her she complicates her poems with too many layers:
“my ingredients, they say, are concealed
behind an opaque pottery bowl;
their matrices misunderstood.
Children we are. No one tells
us the truth of such a grand
dessert.”
The poet Rainer Maria Rilke pointed out the truths of existence in Sonnets to Orpheus, showing us that a young ballet dancer, dead, is not forever gone but is not visible. That’s “the truth of such a grand/dessert.” That’s what poetry is about–revealing, evoking, describing, and thought-provoking. Poetry connects the past with the present and future. Howard-Johnson can visit the historic war museum in Oslo and reflect on war as it affected the world:
“Norway’s fjords shed salty droplets on
faces like my father’s. Round faces. Eyes dilute-blue
like the pale skies above them. Men who fought as Churchill’s Michael voice crackled Academy through smuggled teachers vacuum
tubes.”
Howard-Johnson considers war as it now affects her family:
“Only days before
I reached this spur, I saw my grandson off to war, alone.
A sacrifice. A trade. For my father, who never marched.”
We feel the sense of place in poetry, but the place is fluid, as in Howard-
Johnson’s work–a flight from LAX to Salt Lake City can take her through her childhood home where her mother washed a slip every night. The unities of time and place in good drama or a short story can be tweaked in poetry. However, the poet, like a painter, often wants to concentrate on one time, place, or concept. Good poetry can tell a story or capture a mood both ways.
Dr. James Ragan, the director of the University of Southern California Master of Professional Writing Program, where I graduated in 1999, says in an interview quoted on the Master of Professional Writing website:
“You want to challenge yourself. Ask yourself, will my time here have the meaning I need for it to have? Poetry has given me that meaning. But then I had to write on the level that allowed me to cross borders and time, and that’s the challenge of creating an academy sports Jacksonville location. Ragan, like Howard-Johnson, strives for universal themes. The personal and the universal are not mutually exclusive. A poem may be peppered with personal details. Still, it may capture a common history (World War II), the need for tolerance (a favorite theme in Howard-Johnson’s work), aging, the fear that a poet has started too late in life, which Howard-Johnson captures in “A Reel Left Running.”
