Posts Tagged ‘ Monsters on Maple Street ’

Ewww. (Moral Relativism in 7th grade.)

April 15, 2009
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Poem #435 by that strange duck (really) Emily Dickinson is a pretty good intro for Bradbury’s “The Earth Men.”  And the idea that the majority decides who’s normal and who’s not (and everything else) really gets some of the kids angry. Seventh graders are strange ducks as well. They like to think of themselves as unique (If I ask, “How many of you are weird?” every hand will go up), but their biggest fear is not fitting in. And they all like think of themselves as  rugged individualists. “The majority doesn’t decide EVERYTHING!” “Like what do they not decide?” Lots of hemming and hawing. “Coolness? Weirdness? Lameness? What?” More hemming and hawing. “How about things like murder and child abuse and racism?” “Racism is an easy one. Even in the time Tom Sawyer is set, you would hear sermons in churches about how slavery was God’s will. But, hmmm. You might be right about the murder one; some things are probably built into us. I don’t know. Maybe it’s just that the majority of us think that now. Hmmm. But…well, let’s talk about Romeo and Juliet again (we talked about it before when we had soliloquy as a vocabulary word

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“-isms” (Also: mucous)

November 29, 2008
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“-isms” (Also: mucous)

All this sleeping in this week is making me a little laggy… When we were talking about idiosyncrasies and -isms the other day, one of the kids brought up the fact that I have a lot of “Mr. Coward-isms.” Point well taken. Examples follow. (Some of them already have their own entries.) 1. MYOB – Mind your own business. Although it’s usually said “bidness.” The initials (a staple of Dear Abby advice back in the day) are always present on one or more whiteboards in my room. When we read Tom Sawyer, it changes to TTYOB – Tend to your OWN bidness, as Aunt Polly tells Jim. As I tell the kids, “You have enough trouble doing that.” Other variations include, “Is this your conversation?” and “I wasn’t talking to you.” 2. The Quiet Stick 3. The Raffle King 4. Clickers 5. “Save it for circle time.” – Seventh graders always want to share (except when you want them to, or about what you want them to). They like to take the discussion off-track. I like a detour now and then, but…when they start wanting to share stories and “this happened to my friend” and… Well, I’m not big on

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“It’s how I was taught!”

November 24, 2008
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Two day week! Woo hoo. The timing worked out better this year, and I finished The Giver last week (no Jeopardy, though), so I have two days for “The Monsters are Due on Maple Street.” Perfect. For these two days, we’re going to work on listening skills. Today, we didn’t even use paper. Even seventh graders appreciate the irony of a whole period IN ENGLISH, without writing. I always start this play by discussing a few things: 1. What makes people afraid. We start with death (and spiders) and come around to the idea that it’s really the unknown that most people fear. “If someone came back from the dead, and said, ‘Hey, it’s pretty cool floating around on a cloud, riffing on your harp all day,’ I don’t think anybody would be afraid of death. ” 2. What fear does to you. It makes you dumb, especially when you’re in a group. We talk about Franklin Roosevelt’s famous line about nothing to fear but fear itself, and after a quick summary of the Great Depression (it’s convenient, if painful, that we’re reliving certain aspects of that currently; this year’s bunch seemed to grasp the ideas better), I ask them,

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Random Featured Post

“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.

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