Election

September 21, 2011
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The boy seems to be liking middle school so far. The adjustment has been smooth, and he seems to have things under control and then some. Not like a lot of my kids. Wait a minute. I just mistyped kids as mids… hmmm, I might like that. Anyway, the boy seems to be acing middle school so… Wait again. His mom is over there making faces, and she’s all,

“Duh.”

“What?”

“Let’s see. He has his dad for two periods, he has his 6th grade teacher for one period (yes, his 6th grade teacher last year is back here at the junior high, so we dialed him in), he has another friend of the family in whose pool he has swum for another period. So he already knows four of his six teachers. Plus his father makes sure he’s first in line for lunch and showed him the ins and outs with the lunch ladies…”

(Aside: If my class before lunch is good, we always leave for lunch one minute early, because I like to be first in line. If they’re bad, only I leave for lunch. The rest of the yahoos sit until I have piled up my tray, so to speak. And then they get to be at the end of the epic line. That class is always my best behaved period. I made sure the boy was in that period.)

“…So I think he might have a few advantages. Not that I’m not proud of him for how great he’s doing, but c’mon….”

Point taken. But still, the boy is a joiner, a real go-getter. Not like his dad. He’s been playing intramural volleyball at lunch, he’s student council rep for his Homie Base class. AND he ran for ASB office.

The rules say that a 7th grader can hold only one of the three offices. He can be secretary/treasurer, but not prez or vice. Weird, I know. There were some other weird things about the election process I didn’t understand (three offices, but the kids could only vote for one person?), but since the Modern Family season premier is tonight, as well as a new Survivor, I won’t get into that shtuff. Plus, I don’t want it to look like sour grapes. And the boy did great.

All the offices were filled by eighth graders.

But let’s get back to his campaign. His posters featured zombies and the slogan “Prevent the Zombie Apocalypse — TB* Will Breathe New Life into ASB!” They were well received.

The speech was a good ‘un.  The tag line? “Vote TB: The Other Mr. Coward!” Nice, huh? Again, kudos all ’round.

One of the kids in another class thought it was funny that we had the same name. I confessed that he was my boy.

After expressing disbelief, she thought it was pretty cool. And then…

“But why did he say he was the UGLY Mr.Coward?”

You probably could have heard the collective duh across the street.

 

 

 

 

* TB = The Boy

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“How cute. Like hobos…” (Also: Hank Williams.)

Wednesday. Vocabulary Pretest. Talk of facades and irony. Both figure large in The Outsiders. More on that later. Today I have more insight from my friendly class. We’re reading chapter 4 (the death of Bob, Dally helping with the getaway, jumping the train out of town), and we get to where Dally is telling Pony and Johnny to “hop the 3:15 freight to Windrixville.” We pause and talk about how it’s only been less than 36 hours (book time) since the beginning. They find it hard to believe until we start to do the timeline. Figure that Pony gets out of the movie in the late afternoon, and gets jumped and saved. Pony and Johnny and Dally go to the Nightly Double the next night, and it’s now 3:15am that same night. Then I make sure they know that a freight is a train. And one girl says, “How cute. Like hobos…” Hobos maybe. Cute? [Audio clip: view full post to listen] Why Don’t You Love Me Like You Used to Do? When the boys run to find Dally at Buck Merrill’s house, Pony offers a brief description of Buck that ends with, “…he was out of it. He dug [...]

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Mr. Coward has been teaching on the beautiful central coast of California since 1989. He sometimes tweets when he's in the right mood: @mrCinSLO.

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