A Summer School Email Conversation

7/8/10 8:22 am
From: B
To: M, K
Subject: Oh joy

(Simon and Garfunkel play in library)

[Kid we hate]: Hey ----, quit taking my hoes.
[Other kid]: Don’t worry about me. Simon and Garfunkel are all about getting hoes. Worry about them.

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7/8/10 8:46 am
From: M
To: B, K
Subject: RE: Oh joy

As an avid S&G fan, I do know they are all about the hos, for shos.

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7/8/10 11:11am
From: K
To: B, M
Subject: RE: Oh Joy

The best part of that is that I am 110% sure that that went over [kid we hate]’s head, and [other kid] knows it.

But he is right. What girl can resist Art Garfunkel’s hair?

I wish I could award no points.

Sometimes I just want to have a giant movie screen in the middle of the front of my classroom and some sort of device where I can push a button and this particular 27 seconds of "Billy Madison" would play. That would be amazing.

Pride and Ridiculousness

I just finished grading the Jane Austen essays I started earlier this week. We watched a documentary about her life and then we watched the film version of Pride and Prejudice, and the kids had to write a paper comparing Austen's life to that of Elizabeth Bennett. Here are some especially fantastic excerpts...

"Jane Austen was a women author in the 19th century..."

"Luckily her father was very supportive of Jane's skill and even bought her a writhing desk."
[wow, I'm not sure what "skills" she had, but they must have been pretty dirty...]

"They've had a hard life especially the girls. All of them were sent off by there parents to church for about a year or two until they can stuff or their own. Like eat walk etc. she was home school and read a lot."

"She had no husband even when the day she died."

"Jame Austen was a young little girl, burn on 1775."

"For Elizabeth Bennett it took her a while to figure out the exact husband she husband."

"Jane Austen had to come face to face with love, but then it broke her heart."

It's like you've never even seen "The Muppet Movie"!!

To end our summer school session, we're reading All Quiet on the Western Front. Today we discussed the beginning of the novel and how poor Franz Kemmerich loses his leg. Of course we talked about his much loved boots and what was going to happen to them now that he didn't need them any more.

I compared his boots to a scene at the beginning of "Wall-E", where Wall-E's tires wore out and he took new ones from a dead robot. I told the kids that I had a conversation about this scene with a teacher friend after the movie came out and she was just horrified at the scene, the larger meaning of taking the tires and what that says about humanity. I reminded the kids of Night, which we read last session, and how it's all about surviving and doing the best to keep yourself alive. A kid raised his hand and then came the following exchange...

Kid: This is why we think teachers have no lives, because they talk about that stuff.
Me, after a brief pause: Oh, wait, let me stop here and apologize for my intelligence. It's terrible that I'm well read. It's SO lame that I can watch a movie and understand cultural allusion. It totally sucks how I can watch kids movies and understand that they're not for kids at all, because they're filled with adult humor, literary and historical allusions and stuff kids just won't understand. Gosh, it's totally the worst to be smart, don't you think? [insert my signature condescending "are you kidding me?" look, complete with eyebrow raise]
Kid: Oh. Uh...
Me: Yeah, let's move on.

Sometimes I'm just proud of myself when I have enough self-control not to tell kids to fuck off.