The Very Clear Hatred of Someone I've Never Met, Part II

So, here's an excerpt from today's 5th grade lesson plan:

Review with students the differences between sit/set, lay/lie, raise/rise, and teach/learn. Have them generate their own examples.

No other materials provided -- no handouts, no books, no helpful notes on what they've already covered so that I know what should be review and what might be new.

So, again, I'm confronted with yet another teacher who appears to hate me, despite never having met me. Lay / lie is a difficult distinction even for adults, even for adults who speak in an educated matter, even for adults who believe that those with good grammar should find strength together through unity, as sticks do when bundled into a fasces , if you will, aka grammar nazis. I mean, come on, in addition to being two separate words, the past tense of "lie" is "lay" -- that is just intentionally aggravating. (And don't even get me started on how weird the participle "lain" sounds to our ears.)

But, I did my best, using the ol' transitive v. intransitive approach to explain the difference. They had no idea what either term meant. Once more unto the breach, I tried to give them a quick mnemonic for the difference in the phrase "lay it on me" demonstrating proper usage -- and was met by giggles and guffaws. Apparently the new generation does not know this idiom, and they all assumed it meant something salacious. (Incidentally, what's with the theme of kids only knowing the dirty definitions for words?) So, I'm pretty sure none of them now know the difference between lay and lie, but they have heard a flustered sub have to acknowledge that he was aware of alternate definitions.

Also pointing to the conclusion that the teacher hates me, what's with the lack of parallelism in the words the teacher wanted reviewed? Sit/set and rise/raise also follow an intransitive/transitive distinction, but how did learn/teach end up in the grouping? (It's like the requisite honor's student who hangs out with the stoners.) I saved them for last, and I had a lot of kids rush in to try and identify one as intransitive and another as transitive, only to look hurt (and even more confused) when I told them that both were transitive. Not only did I not teach them, I think I may have un-taught them, and left them more confused than they started.

Hatred, confusion, humor, sex, betrayal -- the lesson was one of the stronger grammar-induced emotional roller coasters I've ever been on (rivaled only by the great Funner v. More Fun of Argument of 2011 my sister and me.)

What Was He Picturing?

So, I was in a sixth grade classroom last week, and they were assigned to read a selection on medieval children's games. About 20 minutes in, one of the students comes up to me and says, "I found a bad word in this." I have him show it to me, and it says:

"Cock fighting was another popular past-time."

I did my best to stifle my laughter, but still:

1) I'm amused that it was only the dirty definition of cock that he knew.
2) Without knowing it meant rooster-fighting, what in the world did he imagine medieval youth were like?
3) After I told this story to a friend, he asked, "So did you teach him about cock?" And thus "Megan's Law" Chicken was born, a popular past-time of post-millennial youth.

A Gem from Today

In the class I was in today, the students were working on computer-based grammar drills. One flagged me down for help, pointed at her screen, and asked, "Is 'whom' even a word?"

It was a high school class.

The Very Clear Hatred of Someone I've Never Met

I was in a first grade classroom today, and the teacher's lesson plans called for cutting and gluing all day. Needless to say, paper scraps everywhere, and sticky hands for all.

Shortly before lunch, we even made "Groundhog Day" puppets. They were cute, but it also meant I spent most of the afternoon having to yell at kids to stop playing with aforementioned puppets. It seemed pretty obvious to me even before we made them that this would be the natural outcome, so the only thing I'm left to assume is that, for some reason, the teacher must really, really hate me. (Even though I've never met her.)

Book Review: The Postmortal by Drew Magary

There needs to be a new term for novels with a science fiction-y premise that are nonetheless written in a literary fashion. You probably know the type I'm talking about -- novels like Cloud Atlas , various Atwood novels, lots of Vonnegut, etc. Into this group I would lump The Postmortal , by Drew Magary. The novel contains a fascinating premise and is an enjoyable read, but is probably too existential for exclusive fans of genre fiction and way too fanciful for fans of strict realistic fiction, making it a bit awkward for it to find a comfortable niche, kind of like me at a party.

Here's the premise: in the great tradition of Fleming, a geneticist accidentally discovers a cure for aging. People can still die of accidents, starvation, cancer, etc. -- but they will never grow old, and in theory they could live for hundreds of years.

As thought experiments go, it's a great one, in that it challenges one's assumptions: to what extent are we motivated by mortality? To what extent is longevity desirable on an individual level? On a societal level?

In his end-of-the-novel acknowledgements, Magary thanks someone for helping him to "make this book into a real novel, instead of a masturbatory idea dump." This is a fairly good summary of the book and the shortcomings it mostly avoids: the novel presents a very detailed and reasonable view of the future (giving us snapshots across almost eighty years of time), while still grounding the narrative in the experiences and perspective of one central character. (One clever device Magary uses is to exploit the conceit that the novel is supposed to be a compilation of blog posts by occasionally giving us "link round-ups," which show international developments and hint at events outside the scope of the main character.)

You may have noticed that I keep referring to the main character without a name -- I honestly don't remember his name. This is partly because the story is told in the first person, so it doesn't come up that often, but also partly because -- going alone with the above-mentioned issue of occasionally struggling to be a story in addition to a thought experiment -- the main character is a bit of an everyman, and while his "voice" is eminently readable and moves along at a nice clip (an accomplishment I'm not deriding), it is also not exactly unique or arresting. In the end, the novel may still fall more toward being about ideas than characters, but the main character's arc has still left me contemplating him and his decisions, which is a good sign.

This novel has very humorous parts, but one would also (spoiler alert) not be remiss to apply the term "dystopian" to it. Overall: recommended, but not for any of you struggling to find a reason to believe in humanity again.

(And for those of you wondering how this fits into the theme of the blog, I say that reading off-the-map fiction and then reviewing it for nobody but themselves is really the quintessential activity of/for aimless millennials.)

The Most Messed Up Thing I've Heard in a While

I was in a fourth grade classroom today. While working on a worksheet about the life of MLK, a girl raised her hand and said, "I know how he died. He was shot in the head."

A boy in the front row responded, "Boom! Headshot."

I'm starting to rethink whether maybe violent video games may have a negative effect on children, after all.