English Teachers Wear Their Hearts on Their Sleeves... or on Their Tee Shirts!

This week was Teacher Appreciation Week.  To help celebrate, the school had a "Twins Day."  Instead of Twins, the English Department became an impressive litter of book-celebrators.  We believe that literature -- and literacy -- matter, and we're willing to billboard our message.

This was an impromptu snapshot taken two minutes before first period started.  There were another half dozen English teachers sporting book tees.

Five Central Students Win National Writing Award

What if a baseball team had so many stars on it that every single player on team was an All Star?   Something like this just happened for Hinsdale Central writers.  We are allowed to invite five students to compete in the national Achievement Award in Writing contest sponsored by the National Council of Teachers of English.  Guess how many were top ranked? 

Congratulations to all five of our students, all juniors:
Laurette McNabb
Elizabeth Storr
Shahzar Risvi
Eric Chang
Selin Turkyilmaz

This is an outstanding achievement for each of these students and for the English Department.  I am so proud of all of the English teachers who work together to create an incredibly rich writing experience for students for all four years of English classes and especially of the five English teachers who mentored these five students during the writing process for this contest:  Michael Palmquist, Cherise Lopez, Hasham Bhatti, Gina Chandler, and Jared Friebel. 

Two Groups of English Teachers from Hinsdale Central Presenting at National NCTE Conference

I am always surprised at the creative, innovative things that teachers in the English Department are doing with students.  It's great to see that our teachers are taking their ideas to a national stage.  Two groups of English teachers have been selected to present at the National Conference of Teachers of English in Atlanta in November.

English teachers Michael Smith and Hasham Bhatti's presentation is entitled "Listen Up & Speak Out: Serial Injustice."  The presentation focuses on work they did with students that involved the NPR Podcast "Serial" and the topic of social justice.

English teacher Robyn Corelitz has teamed up with Downers Grove North teacher (and Department Chair) to speak about a cross-district collaborative online writing project they worked on together with their students.  The presentation is titled "CLEAR Learning: How 9th and 12th Grade Teachers Brought Their Students Together."

Robyn Corelitz

Hasham Bhatti and Michael Smith

   

Congraulations to Midwest Regional Shakespeare Champion Carlo Zenner

Regional Finalists.  Carlo, 2nd from right, was the winner

Congratulations to Senior Carlo Zenner who won the Midwest Regional Shakespeare competition on Tuesday at Newberry Library and qualified for Nationals in New York City!  Carlo has been working to master his performance skills with Hinsdale Central Acting teacher Erin Lundin and Hinsdale Central British Literature 1: Shakespeare teacher Michael Palmquist.

Learn more about the competition at the English-Speakers Union website.

Tell Your Story storytellers announced

I was excited to get my invitation to the Tell Your Story Event on February 18 and to see the list of storytellers!  Last year's event was astounding, and I'm looking forward to Feb 18!

Congratulations to the students and to the faculty sponsors, English teachers Robyn Corelitz, Hasham Bhatti, Kate Saunders, and Gina Chandler.

Greetings!

We are very excited to invite you to the Second Annual Tell Your Story event on Thursday, Feb. 18th from 5:00-6:30 p.m. in the Community Room at HCHS.

All essays were written with inspiration from this year’s theme—Knots. 10 students were chosen to read their personal essays at the event. There will be music by singer-songwriters Gia Margaret and Alain DeCourtenay, hot chocolate, treats, and more.

Please consider stopping by this event to support our wonderful writers.

The 10 students are:

Kai Foster

Ann Steephen

John “Jack” Kanzler

Nicko Ledesma

James Zhou

Armen Kelikian

Grace Hafner

Seetha Aribindi

Davis Miller

Isha Kukadia

Jorune Gurevicius is the English Department Student of the Quarter

I'm proud to announce that  Jorune Gurevicius (Class of '16) is the English Department's Student of the Quarter. She was selected by her World Literature teacher, Julia Kapelnikova.  When Ms. Kapelnikova introduced Jorune at the Student of the Quarter Breakfast this morning, she spoke about a Jorune's positive attitude, curiosity, excitement about talking about literature, and maturity.  Congratulations Jorune!

Congratulations Model UN!

There was fantastic news from this weekend's Model UN conference in Chicago called CIMUN, the Chicago International Model United Nations.  There were seven Hinsdale Central students who walked away with big awards in this international event.  It's hard to overstate how amazing this is.

CIMUN (pronounced sigh-mun, website here) is an international conference with attendees from some of the best schools in the country.  Many of the schools also offer Model UN as a class.  When our students, working as a club (not as a class), win awards, it is remarkable.  To win this number of awards is simply amazing.  Historically, it's the most awards we've ever won at a conference and the highest number in percentage terms by far.  Model UN isn't only about awards, in fact we try to downplay it, but this is simply amazing.

Michael Palmquist, Central English teacher, serves as Model UN sponsor.  Congratulations to all the students who participated.  Special note to the following:  

Alec Johnson - Outstanding Delegate - US Cabinet

Monica Bhagavan - Honorable Mention - League of Arab States.

Jacob Liu - Best Delegate and Delegate's Choice Award - International Press Delegation

Mita Rimani - Outstanding Delegate - League of Arab States

Peter Ren - Honorable Mention - Historical Security Council

Zach Kanjirath and Aneesh Balusu - Delegate's Choice - Historical General Assembly