The Living Rockumentary

Here it is, on the eve of February vacation and just before I start planning ahead, here’s a chance to quickly look back.

Writing Workshop 6 (or as I refer to it in my head, WW6) The last few days we’ve been plowing through the process of writing college application essays. Remember them? I’m satisfied that each of the students has arrived at a good idea for their essays, although the last week before vacation is a difficult time to get them to focus on the actual process of writing drafts very mindfully. One is writing about writing, how her daily journal writing is a therapeutic release from the misery of adolescence. Sounds awfully familiar. Another has set up an essay where tennis is the game of life- he adapts his returns to however the shots come at him. The remaining four students are writing about some aspect of horseback riding. Ending up with four girls who own horses and are each avid riders in the same class is educational to me, considering I’ve never been on a horse in my life. Now I can say I know something about air delay, dark and light bay, roan, markings, show names, and what it means if a horse has or doesn’t have socks. Anyway, I’m looking forward to one essay in particular in which a student sees aspects of ADD behavior in her horse. In other words, she’s describing herself through the description of her horse.

New Traditions in American Literature & Composition We are still in the midst of a poetry unit, which not only looks at juicy works like Randall Jarrell’s “The Death of The Ball Turret Gunner” and Sylvia Plath’s “Cut” but also features works by a contemporary American writer by the name of Anthony Westcott. Whenever I have students write original pieces, I join them in doing so but I also like to use older works to illustrate usage of literary devices. For instance, for those of you who know my old comedy song that parodies the “Where, oh where can my baby be?” chestnut, you may be interested to know that I’ve written a revised version that takes out some of the purely crass imagery and replaces it with uses of hyperbole, understatement, irony and paradox. The lyrics still wallow in delightfully hideous description, which comprise the song’s value as entertainment. In addition, it’s probably just a treat to be sitting in class listening to your teacher play his guitar and sing this utterly gross song about a girl dying in the most gruesome way, even if you need to be listening for evidence of the literary devices. In the Composition class that connects to this one, we’ve been slaving through the peer editing process, looking closely at how effective the introductions and conclusions are in their persuasive essays on whether the character of Bruno in Strangers on a Train is crazy or not, considering the denotations, connotations, and associations of the word “crazy.” We’re also helping each other with elevating diction to a more appropriate academic level. For example, rather than “Bruno goes up to the Senator,” “Bruno approaches the Senator” or rather than “it seems like,” “the scene suggests.”

Writing Workshop 2 My 9th graders are halfway through The Catcher in The Rye, writing short answers upon all the hallmark themes (phoniness) and symbols (the red hunting hat) in that novel. It’s a natural fit reading this novel about a male from a wealthy family at boarding school who’s perched between childhood and adolescence with two boys at this school.

American Literature Survey Like the other lit class, this group is dealing with poetry, only the focus is on more classic material from folks like Emily Dickinson and Robert Frost. Walt Whitman and T.S. Eliot have also made appearances and some of the kids begged for Poe to be included so that’s in the mix too, along with some of the stuff we do in the other class. This week we were mired in irony, looking at it in our poems along with clips from Simpsons episodes, News of The Weird, as well as the aforementioned car crash song. We also explicated Alanis Morisette’s “Ironic” song, which is filled with examples of ironic situations that aren’t true ironies. Isn’t it ironic that a song about irony isn’t really about irony? The objective for the class is to try to introduce elements into Alanis’ situations to make them ironic, which is a fun mental exercise. For instance, “rain on your wedding day” isn’t ironic in and of itself but as MH suggested, what if the guy getting married was a meteorologist who specifically chose that day, assured that it wouldn’t rain? MD chipped in with his idea of holding it indoors on the hottest day of the year, whereupon the hot blazing sun set fire to the roof, which set off the sprinklers and soaked everyone inside. I could keep going and going with how imaginative these kids can be. What’s even better is when they arrive to class the next day excitedly telling me how ironic their lives are when they think about it. One girl told me that an antagonist from another social clique had rudely thrown something at her in the hall, which turned out to be a tiny, heart-shaped Valentine’s Day candy with the words “Be My Friend” printed upon it.

Musical Expression J, S, and A, along with myself have been enlisted to be the pit band in the musical which will debut Spring Family Weekend in late March. The musical is Pom Pom Zombies, which is about a group of teens in the early 60s whose hangout is the beach, which happens to be near a nuclear energy plant. The musical winks at the teen culture of that era, those Frankie & Annette movies, Cold War fears, and B-movie horror flicks. The music is garage-rocky with flavors of doo-wop and surf rock thrown in. Often, the songs strongly resemble famous tunes. Greaser Roger’s “Don’t Touch The Hair” sounds a lot like “Blue Suede Shoes.” When the head cheerleader expires after taking a bite of a hot dog poisoned with radioactive waste (later becoming a zombie), her boyfriend breaks out into song: “My girlfriend’s dead and I’m gonna get in trouble” and it’s a dead ringer for “My boyfriend’s back and you’re gonna get in trouble.”