Before I began my semester of long-term substituting for 10th grade English, the previous teacher had the classes read a number of poems, including “The Abandoned Farmhouse” by Ted Kooser (go ahead and read it: this will make more sense afterwards, and it’s a short one).
The students seemed unimpressed by most of the poetry, which led to some of them being somewhat… creative when they wrote their answers on the worksheets, which I then graded. For example:
“8. How do we know how many members of the family lived in the house?”
“You take the number of adult males, the number of adult women, and the number of small children, and you then add all these numbers together, thus getting 3 inhabitants of the living structure.”
“10. What do you think happened to the family living in the farmhouse? Support your reasons with details from the poem.”
“They were captured and taken aboard a pirate ship. This situation is typical of a pirate abduction, notable because of the implied quickness of the event, with everything just being left there. It’s ok, because they were probably Communists anyways.”
It’s somewhat surprising to me that teenagers often seem nonplussed by poetry, considering the level of imagery and detail they put into their own writing (and not the stuff they turn in to teachers, either). Consider the following note that I confiscated one day (I have edited things to keep the identities of those involved under wraps, as well as for length):
Girl 1: Note begins with a story about seeing an unidentified female and trying to avoid them. After avoiding her the first time, “I hid in the middle of a group of freshman and cursed at her back. On the way to gym class, she passed me and like flipped her hair at me! Bizitch! oh well, I will find some way to get revenge!”
Girl 2: “Awww! What a son of a biscuit! Slorkatahoe! (Spelling?) does she realize that she’s being a hoebag?”
Girl 1: “idk, she didn’t even have the decency to tel lme! How could she NOT know that she is being a hoebag? Her skank juice is ALL OVER HIM!”
Occasionally the same creative imagery that brought us such descriptions as “Slorkatahoe” (and no, I don’t know what that means either) comes out in verbal communication, such as when one student, appalled at something they though was a very bad idea, announced that it was “like giving a monkey a gun!”