Shakespeare

Playing God II

January 6, 2010
By

OK, I’m finally going to finish the bomb shelter story. Maybe. After we finished The Giver, we had a couple of days before Christmas to sort of debrief and discuss. We talked about “the end justifying the means” and such, and if it is OK to sacrifice one innocent to save multiple others. (Here’s Part I.) Then I busted out something I hadn’t used in years; the old bomb shelter exercise. I got it out of an old 70′s touchy-feely teaching book. I had to give some background about “duck and cover” and Mutually Assured Destruction and that sort of thing (good groundwork for The Martian Chronicles later on), and they laughed about hiding under their desks from nuclear weapons, and then… “So now the missiles are coming in two minutes. Your bomb shelter has enough room and supplies for you, your family, and six other people. But there are 10 people pounding on your door begging to be let in. You have to leave four outside to die.” I give them the same group of ten supplicants I got from the old book: a) An accountant, 31 years old, b) his wife who is 6 months pregnant, c) a

Read more »

Random Featured Post

Oh Raffle King, Oh Raffle King…

(Sung — way off key, and sort of warbley — to the tune of “Oh Christmas Tree.”) I guess we need to talk about the King. On Wednesdays, after we go over the vocabulary homework, and discuss the words, I give them a vocabulary pretest. If they ace it (100%), they are exempt from the vocabulary portion of the Friday test. I used to have one of them flip a coin to decide whether or not I let them use their “cheat sheet” — the homework page we just went over and corrected — on the pretest. What they don’t believe when I tell them — even though it’s true — is that, on average, their scores on the pretest are lower when they use the cheat sheets, and fewer of them get an exemption. But they like to think it’s a security blanket, so I play along. Then I discovered the King. I would give you the URL of his creator’s web site, but he has some other, shall we say, inappropriate shtuff. (You can do a Google search if you really want to check it out.) So I took the liberty of “cloning” the King. If you click [...]

more -->


Mr. Coward has been teaching on the beautiful central coast of California since 1989.

Archives

May 2012
M T W T F S S
« Apr    
 123456
78910111213
14151617181920
21222324252627
28293031  

Recent Comments