Faith’s Blog

From Oklahoma best-selling author Faith Phillips and the Senior class of Stilwell High School comes the groundbreaking book, 2020 Visions. It is the first published account of the Class of 2020 in the time of Covid-19.
Ms. Phillips begins the account of this extraordinary ordeal by sharing personal journal entries about an unlikely decision to teach English IV for one year in Adair County, where the students and school struggle to negotiate a 45% child poverty rate.

The students journal their own doubts as they move through their final year with a dubious, untested new teacher. The class transformation from the beginning of the year to Spring Break 2020 is a remarkable and triumphant story, worthy of a book on its own. The list of accomplishments the students make together in a very short period of time is nothing short of exceptional and historic, from raising funds to get their own set of class Chromebooks, to publishing a podcast selected for national recognition by National Public Radio. Then Covid-19 arrived. With the arrival of unprecedented change and mournful loss the students continue to journal their experience with jaw-dropping honesty and powerful visions of the future.

Visions 2020 is the first comprehensive chronicle to share the struggle, grief and tenacity of the Class of 2020. Full of refreshing honesty, spirituality, advice, and hope, it makes the perfect graduation gift for 2020 graduates and their parents. What’s more, the first $15,000 in book royalties (after recoup of up-front publishing costs including original cover art, editing, printing, etc.) will provide Chromebooks for SHS Junior, Sophomore and Freshman classes. By pursuing this continuation of the initial Senior #Chromedreams project, 2020 Visions will ensure that every student who passes through Stilwell High School has daily access to the same tools students in larger Oklahoma school districts already enjoy.
Reserve your copy now for this historic record of tragedy, joy, and triumph in the year that will forever be remembered as the year of “the chosen ones”: the Class of 2020. Order your hard copy of 2020 Visions at the link below for $25.00. Digital copies will not be made available until Fall 2020.
Please note that reserving your copy now reserves your spot to receive a book from the first hardcopy shipment in July 2020.

Reserve your copy here for $25. https://www.paypal.me/FaithPhillips

An early review of 2020 Visions:

“Two stars up! If you like rolling in red dirt and howling at the moon, this book is for you! A must read for anyone under the age of 95! This is Grapes of Wrath meets Freedom Writers on The Road. Yeehaw!” -Mrs. McGraw (a note in the interest of integrity: Mrs. McGraw is the author’s English Department colleague and receives a favorable portrayal in the book.)

Thursday, April 30

“As to when I shall visit civilization, it will not be soon, I think. I have not tired of the wilderness; rather I enjoy its beauty and the vagrant life I lead, more keenly all the time. I prefer the saddle to the streetcar and star-sprinkled sky to a roof, the obscure and difficult trail, leading in tot he unknown, to any paved highway, and the deep peace of the wild to the discontent bred by cities. Do you blame me then for staying here, where I feel that I belong and am one with the world around me? It is true that I miss intelligent companionship, but there are so few with whom I can share the things that mean so much to me that I have learned to contain myself. It is enough that I am surrounded with beauty …

Even from your scant description, I know that I could not bear the routine and humdrum life that you are forced to lead. I don’t think I could ever settle down. I have known too much of the depth of life already, and I would prefer anything to an anticlimax.”

~Into the Wild, Chapter 9

It seems as though people are really searching for leaders, someone to step up and unify the citizenry. 

Journal: Do you see yourself as a leader? How could you work as a leader in the Stilwell community? If you do not consider yourself a leader that’s perfectly fine but you will choose the leaders in the very near future. Explain to me what you are looking for in a leader.

Friday, May 1

“As I came home through the woods with my string of fish, trailing my pole, it being now quite dark, I caught a glimpse of a woodchuck stealing across my path, and felt a strange thrill of savage delight, and was strongly tempted to seize and devour him raw; not that I was hungry them, except for that wildness which he represented. Once or twice, however, while I lived at the pond, I found myself ranging the woods, like a half-starved hound, with a strange abandonment, seeking some kind of venison which I might devour, and no morsel could have been too savage for me. The wildest scenes had become unaccountably familiar. I found in myself, and still find, an instinct toward a higher, or, as it is named, spiritual life, as do most men, and another toward a primitive rank and savage one, and I reverence them both. I love the wild not less than the good.

There is an incessant influx of novelty into the world and yet we tolerate incredible dullness. I need only suggest what kind of sermons are still listened to in the most enlightened countries. There are such words joy and sorrow, but they are only the burden of a psalm, sung with a nasal twang, while we believe in the ordinary and the mean. We think we can change our clothes only. We do not believe that a tide rises and falls behind every man which can float the British empire like a chip, if he should ever harbor it in his mind. Who knows what sort of seventeen-year locust will next come out of the ground? The government of the world I live in was not framed, like that of Britain, in after-dinner conversations over the wine. The life in us is like the water in the river…”

~Conclusion, Thoreau

Ten years from now all this will be a faded memory; a story to tell your children. 

Journal: Write a letter to your 28 year-old self explaining what we have been through. What is your 28 year old self doing? Where are you living and what are you doing from day to day? Give yourself some advice. What do you want to remember ten years from now? 

Monday, April 27

“I never fastened my door night or day, though I was to be absent several days; not even when the next fall I spent a fortnight in the woods of Maine. And yet my house was more respected than if it had been surrounded by a file of soldiers. The tired rambler could rest and warm himself by my fire, the literary amuse himself with the few books on my table, or the curious, by opening my closet door, see what was left of my dinner, and what prospect I had of a supper. Yet, though many people of every class came this way to the pond, I suffered no serious inconvenience from these sources, and I never missed anything but one small book, a volume of Homer…

You who governs public affairs, what need have you to employ punishments? Love virtue, and the people will be virtuous. The virtues of a superior man are like the wind; the virtues of a commen man are like the grass; the grass, when the wind passes over it, bends.”

Thoreau, The Village

We tend to get busy living life and become self-absorbed. But life has a way of making you stop sometimes, right in your tracks, and notice someone. 

Journal: Write an essay on someone in your life (someone you know or even perhaps a stranger you’ve noticed in town, anyone, really) for whom your life is worth pausing for a moment. Who is this person? What makes them so compelling to you? What do they need that you could provide for them?

Tuesday, April 28

“‘For instance,’ Stoppel continues, ‘Carl didn’t want to fly into the bush alone. His big dream, originally, was to go off into the woods with some beautiful woman. He was hot for at least a couple of different girls who worked with us, and he spent a lot of time and energy trying to talk Sue or Barbara or whoever into accompanying him — which in itself was pretty much pure fantasyland. There was no way it was going to happen. I mean, at the pipeline camp where we worked, Pump Station 7, there were probably forty guys for every woman. But Carl was a dreamin kind of dude, and right up until he flew into the Brooks Range, he kept hoping and hoping and hoping that one of these girls would change her mind and decide to go with him. Carl was the sort of guy who would have unrealistic expectations that someone would eventually figure out he was in trouble and cover for him. Even as he was on the verge of starving, he probably still imagined that Big Sue was going to fly in at the last minute with a planeload of food and have this wild romance with him.’”

Into the Wild, Chapter 8

I’ve been in communication with many of you since we have been out of school. Someone suggested that we take a float trip or organize a get-together at the lake after the social isolation restrictions are lifted. 

Journal: Describe the perfect meal you would want to have at our celebration. Tell me everything you want, from the appetizers, to the main courses, to the sides and the dessert. No limits. What do you want? 

Wednesday, April 29

“White Pond and Walden are great crystals on the surface of the earth, Lakes of Light. If thery were permanently congealed, and small enough to be clutched, they would, perchance, be carried off by slaves, like precious stones, to adorn the heads of emperors; but being liquid, and ample, and secured to us and our successors forever, we disregard them, and run after the diamond of Kuhinoor. They are too pure to have market value; they contain no muck. How much more beautiful than our lives, how much more transparent than our characters, are they! We never learned meanness of them. How much fairer than the pool before the farmer’s door, in which his ducks swim! Hither the clean wild ducks come. Nature has no human inhabitant who appreciates her. The birds with their plumage and their notes are in harmony with the flowers, but what youth or maiden conspires with the wild luxuriant beauty of Nature? She flourishes most alone, far from the towns where they reside. Talk of heaven! Ye disgrace earth.”

~Thoreau, The Ponds

My grandmother has been in isolation since the pandemic started (I think we are going on six weeks now, but I lose count). She has a sliding glass door to the outside but it is locked by the maintenance crew so we can’t hug her or touch her in any way. We just go outside her glass door and wave and kiss her on the glass and bring her flowers to look at. It is a really, really hard thing to do for us. I can’t even imagine what it is like for her. She is locked in a room and has been for many weeks. 
Journal: Do you have a loved one whom you cannot reach because of this situation? If so, how are you dealing with it? If not, tell me how you would occupy your time if you had to be alone in a room by yourself for several months.

Thursday, April 23

“I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived. I did not wish to live what was not life, living is so dear; nor did I wish to practise resignation, unless it was quite necessary. I wanted to live deep and suck out all the marrow of life, to live so sturdily and Spartan-like as to put to rout all that was not life, to cut a broad swath and shave close, to drive life into a corner, and reduce it to its lowest terms, and, it it proved to be mean, why then to get the whole and genuine meanness of it, and publish its meanness to the world; or if it were sublime, to know it by experience, and be able to give a true account of it in my next excursion. For most men, it appears to me, are in a strange uncertainty about it, whether it is of the devil or of God, and have somewhat hastily concluded that it is the chief end of man here to ‘glorify God and enjoy him forever’” 

~Thoreau, Where I Lived and What I Lived For

As human beings, we are each masterpieces. Each of us is worthy of love, dignity, and respect. 

Journal: Write about the characteristics you have that make you a unique masterpiece. Tell me what is good about you. Discuss at least three things about you that make you worthy of love, dignity, and respect. Don’t be shy! Brag on yourself!

Friday, April 24

“Alex used to sit at the bar in the Cabaret and read that belt for hours on end, says Westerberg, “like he was translating hieroglyphics for us. Each picture he’d carved into that leather had a long story behind it.” When McCandless hugged Borah goodbye, she says, “I noticed he was crying. That frightened me. He wasn’t planning on being gone all that long; I figured he wouldn’t have been crying unless he intended to take some big risks and knew he might not be coming back. That’s when I started having a bad feeling that we wouldn’t never see Alex again.”

Into the Wild, Chapter 7

At the beginning of Into the Wild, not long after he begins his journey, Christopher McCandless has his only real possession, his crappy old car, washed away in a flood. From then on he must complete the rest of his journey by foot. 

Journal: If you could wash away some things from your past and just start over again, what would you send away in the flood? What are some things you would hold on to if you could? What do you value enough to carry with you on your journey?

Thursday, April 16

“One morning I was shaving in a restroom when an old man came in, and observing me, asked me if I was ‘sleeping out’. I told him yes, and it turned out that he had this old trailer that I could stay in for free. The only problem is that he doesn’t really own it. Some absentee owners are merely letting him live on their land here, in another little trailer he stays in. So I kind of have to keep things toned down and stay out of sight, because he isn’t supposed to have anybody over here. It’s really quite a good deal, though, for the inside of the trailer is nice, it’s a house trailer, furnished, with some of the electric sockets working and a lot of living space. The only drawback is this old guy, whose name is Charlie, is something of a lunatic and it’s rather difficult to get along with him sometimes.”

Into the Wild, Chapter 5

By the time I was eighteen years old I had already fallen in love and had my heart broken. That would happen again several times afterward. Eventually, I would forgive and become friends with *almost* every single person who broke my heart. 

Journal: Tell me about a time when your heart was broken. It doesn’t have to be romantic love, it could be any relationship that hurt you. Do you feel a desire to see that relationship restored? Can you imagine forgiving that hurt? How does that look in your mind? 

Friday, April 17

It was formerly the custom in our village, when a poor debtor came out of jail, for his acquaintances to salute him, looking through their fingers, which were crossed to represent the grating of a jail window, “How do ye do?” My neighbors did not thus salute me, but first looked at me, and then at one another, as if I had returned from a long journey. I was put into jail as I was going to the shoemaker’s to get a shoe which was mended. When I was let out the next morning, I proceeded to finish my errand, and, having put on my mended shoe, joined a huckleberry party, who were impatient to put themselves under my conduct; and in half an hour, –for the horse was soon tackled—was in the midst of a huckleberry field, on one of our highest hills, two miles off; and then the State was nowhere to be seen.

This is the whole history of “My Prisons.”

~Civil Disobedience, Thoreau

Journal: Henry David Thoreau is one of many philosophers who spent some time in jail. He was put in prison for failure to pay taxes. Imagine yourself behind bars for several weeks, like Thoreau. Write a letter to your friends and family. 

Song of the Day: My Hometown, by Charlie Robinson. Song selection by B.H.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wg1pYtoWL6c