Ben Blue Froling Dublin School

240 Roxbury St P.O. Box 522

Keene, NH 03431 18 Lehmann Way
Grade Level: 10th Grade Dublin, NH 03444
Advisor: Ms. Lanessa Davis 603.563.8584

School Year: 2019 - 2020

Academics
Fall Trimester 1
Comment for

English 10: Global Voices

Jonathan Phinney

Starting the trimester with drafts they wrote over the summer, English 10 students immersed themselves in the process of peer reviewing, revising, and editing
their close reading essays on Exit West, by Mohsin Hamid, a visionary novel about the many struggles and redemptions of migrants the world over. Next, the class
took on the masterful essays of Zadie Smith in her collection Feel Free, which delved into encounters with art and artists from film to hip-hop, dance to painting,
writing to music. Along the way, students grappled with questions of identity, selfhood, and perception, while considering the multitude of ways art orders meaning
for human beings, ending the term writing a personal essay exploring their own relationships to a particular art object.

I appreciate Ben’s sense of humor and playfulness. He has the ability to speak with clear and penetrating insightfulness seemingly without trying too hard, and he
can write well punctuated and grammatically correct sentences in a relatively short time. Ben is a wonderful descriptive writer, as demonstrated in his personal
essay: “The painting consists of many[…] shards of colors, aligned like a mosaic. A black and red color scheme dominates […] but there are pockets of yellows,
blues, and greens hidden in corners and along edges. Smaller white slivers slash through this already fragmented piece.” What I’d like him to do in the winter term
is to see how much more he can do without trying, how much more he can fit into his sentences, how many more questions he can ask, how many ways he can
formulate or complicate existing questions. He can improve his writing by expanding his aperture and thinking in broader terms as a way to structure his
fine-grained observations, and build outward with his ideas. It is a pleasure having Ben in English 10. I wish him a wonderful break.

Run Date: 12/4/2019 Page 1 of 7