Nearing the end of the quarter

My desk must be under all of these papers . . . somewhere.

You know my juniors loathe reading. Well, most of them do. They do it for a grade but it’s mostly drudgery for them. But when you turn them loose to be creative, watch out. We are reading some Edgar Allen Poe (“The Masque of the Red Death”) so I came up with several creative assignments they could do - rather than the traditional end of the story worksheet or questions. There are several artistic options (create an action figure of the red death, create a board game for the story, draw a scene from the story) and there are several creative writing options (write a modern day screen play of it, turn it into a CSI episode, pretend you are one of the first people on the scene and write a journal chronicling what you witness) and a few others. Whenever I give them something like this, they go wild. They will work all hour without me having to keep them on task. You think I would learn to do more of this. Maybe I don’t because it doesn’t feel like traditional “learning” or it doesn’t neatly meet a state standard or is easily measurable on a test. But watching the kids work on their projects, taking ownership in the work and totally investing themselves in it, is proof enough for me.

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In Senior English we are reading a section from Samuel Johnson’s biography and a bit from dictionary of the English language. So I decided to have the students do something a little different. I wanted to put them into Johnson’s shoes, so I went to the Oxford English dictionary web site and looked up all the new words they added this year. Then I ran copies off. Their assignment was twofold - first, take five words we use today and update their meanings (“gay” would be an example of this) and second, come up with five new words that should be included in next year’s dictionary.

Here is what they came up with --

new words to be added -

roticitate - rotate in a circle around the fire.

bling - fancy or nice jewelry.

fugly - something that is fu*&ing ugly.

der - an exclamation one makes when something is various obvious.

ginormous - something that is bigger than big (actually it’s a combination of gigantic and enormous)

emo - a person with major depression and confusion of who they are supposed to be. Whine and complain about life.

O-snap - What someone yells when someone is burned.


common words with updated definitions -

Adult - old fun stopper.

Deer hunting - red neck super bowl.

Burn - to be insulted or picked on.