I’m trying to phonetically represent the theme from Jaws. You know, the whole approaching shark thing. Da dum. The dreaded 120 Seconds is coming! It’s January, and time for my crew to publicly display their mad oral reading and public speaking skills. Da dum, Da dum, Da dum. “Has anyone ever peed their pants?” “No, but I had one run out the door…’I'm going to be reading from…uh…’ and BAM, she was gone out the door. I sent somebody after her after about five minutes. I think that one came close.” “What’s the record for likes and uhs?” “120. We had to give her another chance the next day. She got it down to 11.” “What if I read from Winnie the Pooh?” “Did you really like it?” (sheepish) “Yes.” “”Well then, you read from Winnie the Pooh.” “What if your friend is in the audience making you laugh?” “One: Get rid of him as a friend. Two: He’d lose points on his, and you’d get to start over. Three: There is no third thing.” “Can I really get into it? And like, wear a wizard’s hat and have a magic wand for reading Harry Potter?” “That’d be beauty. Too
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We’re pretty much finished with the 120 Seconds presentations, and my aide has typed up the list of books we heard from so far. Not everyone has remembered to add his/her book to the list on the board — I know I heard some Unfortunate Events and some Goosebumps (from the EL kids) and even some Hardy Boys and Heidi of all things– but this is a good start. Repeats have been eliminated. Harry Potter frequency was down this year. Percy Jackson was waaay up. Half my classes are ready to camp out for the movie premier (in two weeks) of The Lightning Thief. (My boy is so excited about that, he can’t cope.) We also heard A LOT of Twilight (duh), and vampires in general were big. So was Alex Rider. But no Lord of the Rings this year. (Yeah!) We also heard from Holden Caulfield, read by a girl. (Jerome RiP.) The Shakespeare one was a simplified version, but still rocked. I gotta find the video of the kid who did The Hunt for Red October. His Russian accent was classic. That was Then, This is Now -S.E. Hinton Interview with the Vampire – Anne Rice Touching Spirit Bear –
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Here are a couple more good examples from our 120 Seconds presentations. My servants (sorry, student assistants) are typing up the list of books we heard from, so I’ll be able to post it this weekend. Here’s Deep M. reading The Cay, by Theodore Taylor, and he’s pretty stoked about it. And Dot (I love having a Dorothy in my class; so old school!) reading a new teen cult classic (whose author is from my neck of the woods, as Dot points out). This book, Thirteen Reasons Why, is pretty hot right now.
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Just a quick one today, to post an example of a fine 120 Seconds presentation. Also to share a revelation I had yesterday for an improvement to the whole thing. It was actually sort of a duh moment; like, it seems so obvious now. Why didn’t I think of it 10+ years ago when I started doing these things? I had one of my student servants make a chart for the wall with four columns: Book Title, Author, Reader, Blurb. After the kids finish their presentations they fill in the info about the book they read. I told them the blurb should just be a back cover sort of thing, or a sentence or two about why others should read it. That way, after a whole buncha these presentations, kids who remember hearing Tina read from a cool-sounding book, but can’t remember what it was called can easily find out. With an luck, they might even go read the book. Which is one of the main objectives of the whole thing. Duh. The ones that had already read were pretty anxious to get their shtuff on the list. They were all pretty stoked on the idea. Duh. It seems so
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We had missed a few days of reading The Midwife’s Apprentice, so I told a couple of the kids scheduled to read to us today for their 120 Seconds presentations that they were postponed until tomorrow, so I could carve out a little more time for reading MWA. You’d have thought I was the governor calling in their pardons, seconds before the warden pulls the switch. I wanted to get to the end of chapter 6, where Alyce/Beetle saves Will, one of the boys who’s been taunting her, from the river. It’s also the chapter where she asks the cat what he wants to be named. It’s also one of my favorite parts of the book, and if I were a seventh grader doing my 120 Seconds, it would be the part I’d read out loud. When Will says that Beetle “were brave” because she didn’t run away, Beetle replies, “Naw, I be not brave. I near pissed myself.” I always have to pause for the pandemonium. Sometimes I repeat the line, milking it like a bad comedian. “I guess she was scared… ‘I near…’” The line is all too appropriate for the way some of them are looking forward
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This afternoon, I asked my friend and colleague, in his experiences with junior high, how many times he could remember seeing two seventh grade boys hugging. Sincerely. “Like a man-hug, or a real one?” “What’s a man hug?” “You know, you start out with the soul shake, and then you pull in and sorta bump chests, and then the other hand sorta slaps the back.” “Not that kind.” “Ummm. None.” “I knew it. It was a first for me too!” Milk and Cheese, the “True That” boys, were at it again. They were moving their desks closer together (again), like they like to do, and jabbering nonsense. Nothing major, and technically it was before class, but I said, “Well the quarter does end Friday, and I change up the seating chart every quarter, so next week I get to move you guys far, far apart.” One of our recent vocabulary words was crestfallen. I should have taken a picture of them to use as an example. Milk holds out both arms pleadingly (and it if it wasn’t sincere, he should be an actor) and says, “But…But…But… What about The Team?” OMG. The class is dying. Half of them are happy [...]
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That reminds me of those great SNL skits about the Sofa King. You know, how the prices are "Sofa King" low, the deals are "Sofa King" great, etc. (You obviously have to say those phrases out loud to get the joke.)