Have you been paying attention to the world much lately? It's a pretty messed up place and stories like the Doctor's Without Borders hospital bombing, the Russian airline crash, pre-2016 politics, and the half naked man on the south side of Rochester with residue from explosive materials in his car, don't leave me much confidence in humanity.
Which is why I try to seek out the happier things in life! The moments of good that invariably due shine through week to week, but are sometimes lost in the cacophony of gloom and doom and scandal and politics. And thus, I try to keep my four thoughts on Friday something positive and uplifting, something to make you laugh or smile or keep you mind off the fact that it's opening night. Oh wait! That's just me! Oops...ok...here we go!
1. I'll go to the reunion just to prove I don't do this anymore! I recently received the invitation to my high school classes 10 year reunion. Reunions feel a little unnecessary and redundant in our Facebook connected world, but the invite promised appetizers and drinks, so what the heck, maybe I'll go! I also recently saw this list of things that were hot in 2005 that are definitely not kosher by 2015 standards, which got me thinking I should probably go to the reunion just to prove that I'm not 'that' person anymore. I mean, I'd like to think I have way more going on now than I did in high school! Dear 18 year old self, Don't worry! You grow into you body, develop a sense of femininity, and it all works out just fine! Love, your 28 year old self. PS. In the meantime, you should stop doing ALL THESE THINGS!
2. Am I suppose to root for someone at the next debate, or wear a paper bag over my head? Having bashed politics as a negative news sources in my introduction, it may seem silly that I'd bring it up here. However, with the third Republican debate coming up next week, and voters having just gone to the polls on Tuesday, it seems only fair to give it a passing mention in this positive context...
It's important to participate in our democracy. Voting is one of the key ways that we get to do that, and, in my opinion, if you don't vote...you don't get to complain! So...with a year to think about who you might cast your ballot for when it comes to the highest office, I encourage you to take the "I Side With..." quiz LINK HERE. I had my media class take it this week as part of our discussion of politics in the media. They didn't have to share their answers, but some kids were surprised with their top matches. It's important to know these things! Think about it!
3: I laugh because it's true! When I saw this, I laughed because I'm pretty sure I've said at least 75% of these things! Mostly the rehearsal notes/tech notes/blocking kinds of things. "I thought about it last night, and I solved it!" is probably my mantra. :-)
4. At this pace I'll write 16,000 words by the end of November. As previously mentioned, November is national novel writing month, and I am working on a project of sorts, but it has woefully fallen by the wayside this week during dress rehearsal time. Hopefully next week I can revive my efforts, but in the meantime, I have put together a few pieces of reminiscing storyline, including this tidbit from one of my all time favorite speech classes. Student's names have been changed!
I’ve had many different favorite classes for many different reasons. My Honors English 10 class will forever hold a soft spot in my heart, for it was a class I designed and implemented myself, and the first group of kids I choose saw me all the way through to the end of my time at the first school where I taught. Similarly, college prep English was always a blast to teach as the level of analysis, discussions, and questions I could challenge them with was far beyond that of my normal classes. There was one class, however, that might be my favorite in that the most random and ridiculous things always seemed to happen during this hour, and the students developed an uncanny ability to roll with the punches.
My first hour speech class was an English elective. For one quarter, students gave a speech a week in an intensive study of public speaking techniques and formats for any occasion. We had tremendous fun in that class! Students gave acceptance speeches at a mock Academy Awards show. They gave toasts at a made up fancy dinner (complete with sparkling grape juice!). They wrote advocacy speeches for an issue they cared about. But before they got into all that good stuff, they reviewed what they already knew about public speaking with a refresher of the good old demonstration speech.
If it wasn’t for the story I’m about to tell, my favorite memory of this class was probably the student that managed to relate every possible speech prompt back to chickens. He did his demonstration speech on how to fold a towel into the shape of a chicken, which hadn’t worked all that well during his demonstration phase. That aside, I remember vividly because I was writing comments on his rubric while the next student was setting up his speech, which is partially why I missed what was coming until it was almost too late.
As a general rule, students love demonstration speeches because they get to make, and then eat, food. The second year I taught speech, I actually made a rule that students could not make chocolate chip cookies for their speech because it was so overdone that I couldn’t take another bite of a cookie without thinking about class. Jordy was not making chocolate chip cookies for his speech. He was making chocolate covered pretzels that you then decorated to look like little reindeer faces. He set up his ingredients on the front table, and was all set to go by the time I finished writing my comments on the chicken towel speech and found his rubric and outline.
As a general rule, I dislike demonstration speeches because there are too many hassles, and moving parts, and things to clean up, and you can only watch someone mix batter in a bowl for so long before it all starts to blur together in a sloppy mess of raw eggs and granulated sugar. Also, most recipes that kids want to make call for a microwave at some point. Either they need to melt the butter, or they need to melt the chocolate, or they need to boil water. There’s always something. I make kids bring in all their own cooking supplies, utensils, bowls, ingredients, and anything else they may need. But I can’t make them bring in their own microwave. And because the home economics room was being used at the same time as my speech class, I made the only other reasonable decision, and I brought in my own microwave from home.
So Jordy sets up his supplies and begins his speech explaining how this is something his mom makes every year, and she taught him how to do it, and now he’s going to teach us. (Baking speeches almost always start with, “So here’s something my mom taught me how to make.”) Step one: melt chocolate chips together with a little bit of butter in the microwave. Jordy carefully opens a small Tupperware container in which he’s premeasured the right amount of butter, and then cuts open his bag of chocolate chips. He explains all about how you need to melt them slowly and make sure that you don’t burn the chocolate. Then proceeds to dump them into a Hillshire Farms lunchmeat container, to which he also adds the butter.
Freeze.
At this point, you know what’s going to happen! At this point, I knew what was going to happen. At this point, I did the most passive aggressive thing I have ever done as a teacher or maybe ever...I let it happen anyway. In my mind, the irony of the situation was not that he was about to not only melt down the chocolate but also the entire flimsy plastic container, but rather that he’d so carefully cautioned us against burning the chocolate, when he was about to create a molten mess of BPA riddled plastic that would surely make his pretzel treats cancerous. In hindsight, it was probably my responsibility to stop him. I mean, we could have burned down the school or something! But I know a genuine learning opportunity when I see one, and this was definitely one.
Unfreeze.
Having warned us about the dangers of burning the chocolate, Jordy puts the container in the microwave for two minutes. That’s right. Two. Whole. Minutes! And now I feel as if I have to say something, because certainly it’s going to explode in there, but I continue to keep my mouth shut. In the meantime, Jordy proceeds with the rest of his speech, talking loudly over the drone of the microwave as he lays out the pretzels and candies for dipping and decorating.
At one minute in, the smell of burning chocolate becomes evident. At one minute and fifteen seconds, it takes on a distinctly artificial and plasticy smell. At one minute and thirty seconds it starts to smoke, at which point I don’t need to say anything because the class is freaking out and Jordy is in a panic. He quickly pushes cancel, and pops the door open to reveal a gooey, molten plastic mess that’s not only all over my microwave plate, but proceeds to ooze onto the linoleum floor.
Jordy never did finish that demonstration speech. I stopped his official time so that he could go down to the janitor to ask for cleaning supplies, and he spent the next 20 minutes scraping rapidly drying, chocolatey gunk off the floor and out of my microwave. And at the end of the day, I couldn’t even dock him a lot of points off on his speech; one, because part of me felt partially responsible for knowing he was going to fail and letting him do it anyway, and two, because really, when it came to learning something from a demonstration, he had given the class a better lesson than any of the other speakers that day!
Happy Trails!
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