Those of us who have been teaching junior high for awhile (and still like it) know that part of the enjoyment of the job is the opportunity to act like a seventh grader now and then. Some of us take that opportunity more often than others.
In the movie 48 Hours, which was the last Eddie Murphy movie I’ve seen, there’s a great scene in the all-white cowboy bar, when Eddie gets all bad cop on them and says, “I’m your worst nightmare, I’m a n***** with a badge…” (Obviously the quote, coming from a young Eddie Murphy, has been cleaned up a bit.) I have always considered myself a sort of ”seventh grader with a badge.” In some of my battles with district administration over the years, I’m sure they’ve had similar thoughts.
Anyway. Lately the kids have been working on one of the few things I actually use that came with our literature anthologies. (I will devote a whole ‘nother post to the lameness of said anthologies. I didn’t even bother to write numbers on my set of giant books – 8 pounds! As if the kids’ backpacks aren’t giant enough– because I didn’t send them home. We read exactly one story out of it –”Thank You M’am“– and one Emily Dickinson poem. ) Part of the deal with buying the anthologies was that they came with a workbook kids could write in, and do the whole “active reading” thing; write in the margins and answer questions and suchlike. Most of the work book is just large print versions of some of the stories in the anthology, with lines on the margins for “notes” and answers to questions. I don’t use that. But in the back of the book are a bunch of exercises similar to parts of our state tests, with things like reading a textbook and getting info from a weather map and other such practical reading applications. The exercises are a bit simple in themselves, but with a bit of in-class discussion and quizzing, they’re pretty useful.
Last night’s reading was focused on looking for what they called “signal words” that show order, importance, chronology, etc. The example they worked from was a brief piece on the life-cycle of the butterfly. Well, what’s the stage after caterpillar called? No, it’s not chrysalis. What’s the thing inside the chrysalis called?
Here are the first three questions from the quiz. (It was open book; the point was to practice extracting information from the reading. NOTA is our shorthand for none of the above.)
- Once a caterpillar has ______ for the last time… a) cracked the egg b) shed its skin c) made a pupa (haha) d) metamorphosised e) NOTA
- …it becomes a _______… a) chrysalis b) spiracule c) caterpillar d) pupa (haha) e) NOTA
- …with a hard covering called a ______. a) pupa (haha) b) egg c) spiracule d) chrysalis e) NOTA
The quick readers start laughing right away. I can’t resist.
“What?”
Giggle. Giggle.
“Get it? Made a poopa?” Seventh grader with a badge.Yes, I know it’s pronounced pewpah. That is not nearly as much fun to say.
One class lost it altogether. It was so much fun, I didn’t care.
“Get it? Made a poopa?”
“Did you put haha after every pupa?” She pronounces it correctly. There were eight questions on the quiz, and most of them had pupa as one of the choices.
“I tried, but I sort ran out of steam toward the end. Get it? Made a poopa? ”
Seventh grader with a badge.
Our anthology is useless too. We read Monsters are Due… and a few poems. A kid once asked me why we don’t take it home, and I told him that 4 out of 5 doctors agree that novels cause fewer back problems (and keep me from going into a coma of boredom).
LOL! I proudly wear my 7th grade badge – love the poopa!
We in the 8th grade love the poopa too!
Re: “Monsters…” in the anthology. When we first got our most recent anthology 6 or 8 years ago, I was going to use it for reading the play. I was reading through the TE, looking what kinds of questions they thought should be asked, and I noticed that the version in this book was different in sections from what I remembered teaching. I dug out a copy of our previous anthology (only 5 pounds), which also had the play in it. Sure enough, the newer one had dumbed down the language in a couple of parts – especially the narrator’s parts. I went back to the storage room and salvaged 40 copies of the old anthology before they threw them away. We use those for reading the play.
I respond similarly when they ask me about taking them home, “Do you really want to lug those things around, and have to keep them covered, and pay fitty dollah when you leave your backpack out in the rain?”