There have been a number of memorable quotes this week from my students. They’re wired because it’s almost the end of the school year. Some examples:
“Mr. Barner is a domesticated rabbit!”
“I used to have a job as a lifeguard, but some little blue kid got me fired.”
This has extended to their classwork as well. Bitter as they are that I’m still making them work in class (“But there are only two weeks left, Mr. Barner! Why do we still have to do work?”), they’re writing funny things on their papers. Not all of them are correct, mind you, but at least they’re writing something.
We read “The Veldt” by Ray Bradbury the other day. It’s a pretty good story, and if you read it first, you’ll have a better idea of what I’m talking about here. I’ll wait.
Ok. At one point in the story, one of the parents of the two spoiled children says, “Children are like carpets, they should be stepped on occasionally.” One of the questions on the worksheet for the story is “Complete this line: ‘Children are like carpets, they should be _________________________________.’” Naturally, because answering this question would involve actually looking at the text of the story, many of my students have been guessing. “Cleaned” is a popular answer, it seems, but the best one I saw completed the sentence: “Children are like carpets, they should be hung from the clothesline and beaten with a stick.”
When I mentioned this answer to another class, one of the students said “Well, it’s a good icebreaker.”
Another question on the worksheet is about the nursery in the story, which (for those of you who didn’t want to bother reading the story) creates a virtual reality world by reading the children’s’ minds and projecting what they want to see. Another question on the study guide was “What kinds of images do you think the parents want the children to imagine?” I got a wide variety of answers, mostly correct, about how the parents would want their children to be imagining and experiencing healthy fantasy worlds. The most amusing answer to that one:
“What kinds of images do you think the parents want the children to imagine?”
“Happy waterfalls of caramel prancing nuget [sic] in the medow [sic] sings a song of satisfaction to the world”