“It is very fulfilling to see our students get into good colleges.  Several of our graduates each  year go to UVA, William & Mary, and other top-tier schools...I also really enjoy seeing books  they’ve read in high school change their thinking.”   - Jonathan Cook

Titles: Chair of the English Department; Faculty Sponsor of the School Literary Magazine,The Middleburg Academy Eclectic, and the Online Newspaper, The Dragon Times
Department: English

Courses Taught:  
English 10 Honors
AP/College English (Dual Enrollment)
English 12

Academic Degrees: 
BA, Harvard College
MA, Ph.D., Columbia University

To contact:  jcook@middleburgacademy.org
 

“Amazing senior year English” is UVA freshman Carol Yacoub’s immediate response when asked which subject she feels most prepared to tackle in college.  “If you’ve had Dr. Cook,” the 2011 Middleburg Academy graduate goes on to explain, “you can handle anything.  He’s incredible...and has taught me so much about writing.”

Carol’s professors will no doubt be impressed with her verbal clarity since Dr. Cook is known to be relentless about vocabulary acquisition, grammatical correctness, and expressive concision.  He encourages the use of mnemonic devices for new vocabulary, but nothing beats a round of “Stump the Teacher” to get students fully engaged in learning new words.  It is rare for students to come up with one that isn’t already familiar to Dr. Cook, but he does admit to being caught out by a few sesquipedalian examples.

Dr. Cook’s students study a variety of literary classics that continue to enrich young people’s minds, as well as some notable contemporary works.  Dr. Cook is a nationally recognized scholar of the writings of Herman Melville, Nathaniel Hawthorne, and Edgar Allan Poe, with many publications on these and other authors.  He has served on a number of panels at literary conferences and as a consultant for various publications.  His most recent work is an essay on Melville’s Typee, forth coming in the volume Critical Insights: Herman Melville from EBSCO publishing.

Dr. Cook is now an occasional contributor to The Shenandoah Press, a new online and print bimonthly covering the region.  You can read his article on the recent Watermelon Park Music Festival by clicking here.  

Dr. Cook was born in Washington, D.C., grew up with four siblings in Hastings-on-Hudson, New York, and lives in Sterling, Virginia in a house full of books.