Friday, June 03, 2005

I mock you with my monkeypants

 Been watching Season Two Buffy again. Introducing the character Oz, they had a scene with animal crackers. Evidently, it is only the monkey who gets to wear pants in late nineties American animal crackers. Hence the awesome line of dialogue I have snarfled as today's title.


My juniors wrote essays today. I tried to trick them into doing it, and was partly successful. I told them that they had to do some 'active note-taking', where I give them sentence starters and they fill in the gaps and find quotes. I was going to break the notes into paragraphs for them to make it clearer, and I'd give them a question to focus the work.

One smart kid noticed that we were writing an essay right off the bat, but I bluffed and said that it was nothing like an essay, and there was nothing to see here.

I fessed up pretty quickly, but luckily the slackers who would give up as soon as they heard the word essay are the same slackers who don't listen when I'm not standing over them threatening to repeatedly call their name until they listen. So in the end, when I told them all to put their essays on my desk before they left, at least two students said "Are we writing essays!?!" in an incredulous manner. Lowest mark so far - 20 out of 50, although 3 kids failed to hand anything in (despite having done at least some of the work).

Best opening line?

In the novel Holes, by Louis Sachar, an important decision made by the character Zero was that he has learned to stand up for himself through violence, by hitting Mr Pendanski across the face with a shovel and sprinting for his life.

That really sums up the heart of that novel for me.

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