Dane Despres

Ashland Community High School

Bowdoin College, Attended 1997 - 2001, Class of 2001, Bachelor's Degree, English

English Teacher

Remember N.H.S. from high school? Awww yeah...

Playing/writing/listening to/reading about/obsessing over music, reading, youth, truth (just a hobby...), erudition, whiffleball, Existentialist philosophy, watching the Red Sox, Socratic questioning

"The Plague" (Camus), "The Brothers Karamazov" (Dostoevsky), "Democracy and Education" (Dewey), "The Trial" (Kafka), "Siddhartha" (Hesse), "Lolita" (Nabokov), "As I Lay Dying" (Faulkner), "To Kill a Mockingbird" (Lee), short stories by Marquez, Flannery O'Connor, Chekov, Cheever, essays by Orwell, James Baldwin, Emerson, and Wendell Berry, and poetry by Wendell Berry, Sylvia Plath, Neruda, Hughes, Billy Collins, Keats, Saul Williams

Rushmore, The Royal Tennenbaums, Wayne's World, Seven Samurai, Dodgeball, American Beauty, The Graduate, The Usual Suspects, The Shawshank Redemption, Lolita (Kubrick), Spinal Tap, Zoolander, Ghost Dog, Fargo, Pi, The Exorcist, Magnolia, Roger & Me, Chasing Amy, American Movie

V (Victor Johnson @ soundclick.com), Ted Leo & the Pharmacists, Elvis Costello, Spoon, the Beach Boys, the New Pornographers, John Coltrane, Wayne Shorter, Ornette Coleman, Big Star, Public Enemy, the Shins, Elliott Smith, the Jam, El-P, the Kinks, MF DooM/Viktor Vaughn/MadVillian, Nick Drake, the Bigger Lovers, Kanye West, blah, blah, blah...

errr, ummm... "Real World/Road Rules Challenge: Battle of the Sexes 2" (Ouch! Guilty pleasure!), "Aqua Teen Hunger Force", "The Daily Show", "The Chappelle Show", "The Simpsons"

Well... I guess I'm a pretty big fan of the idea that your personality and identity are drawn only in comparison and contrast to those around you. With that said, the following is a list of contrasts that, in my opinion, define me well. 1: I live in Lexington, MA, but I have worked in a lumber mill. So far, that's the only thing I know that separates me from the rest of this town's citizenry. 2: I am a teacher, but I don't try to ram knowledge into kids' brains, force kids to sit and listen to me for 80 minutes, think of my kids as my own children and cry whenever they do something nice, completely hate the mostly crappy "No Child Left Behind" or the standards movement, applaud the greatness of the institution or the martyr mindset of some of my colleagues, or like the job because of the great hours. My dream is to someday start my own secondary school. 3: In general comparison to most people, I'm quite gregarious when I'm in a small group of people I know, passionate about abstract ideas and ideals (but I'm not a zealot), enjoy quiet time to myself, read slowly, really like chocolate pudding and chips'n'salsa, love music, fall asleep super quickly, and am not entertained by what is commonly accepted as news media these days. I'm a novice actor and director with no time outside of my theater classes to do either... except during the summer, when I work on planning 15 hours a week and have a part-time job to pay those pesky college loans that my pathetic salary doesn't allow me to comfortably repay. What did I say about the martyr mentality? I guess I perpetrate that a bit myself...

People who know me or knew me at one time.

People who want to play in a band with me, a budding songwriter (blush, blush).