Today I was running off some News from the Media Center newsletters and putting them in teachers’ boxes, and a few memories flooded back: I print my newsletters on paper I’ve recycled from the copier at the Governor’s Honors Program, so things will show up on the backs of stuff that remind me of what an incredible intellectual playground GHP is.

Today, there was an entry on war from the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, from Daniel Byrd’s course on Just War; a piece of music score paper with handwritten music theory assignments; the Black Knight scene from Monty Python and the Holy Grail, in Latin, along with the lyrics to “Oops, I Did It Again” and “We Are the Champions”; an algorithm for a “super-random” number generator; and pages from my own “Sonnet 18” in progress.

There might just as well have been material on emotional attachment disorder, Anglo-Saxon poetry, comic book heroes, the history of the Bible or the Koran, microgenetics, Shakespeare, architectural elements, business law, the Arabic alphabet, Machiavelli’s The Prince, orchestral parts to Stravinsky’s Firebird or Haydn’s Lord Nelson Mass, personality traits, or Stanislavsky’s acting theories.

This is the kind of stuff that fills the six weeks of every summer in Valdosta as we make our way through the program. Just imagine the kind of student who eagerly devours this material, imagine nearly 700 of them, and imagine the teachers who bring it all to them. This is the life I lead each summer.