2005-10-05

And the moral of the story is

.

We've been talking about fables in sophomore English. To start off today, we came up with good, solid, universal lessons worth everyone should learn in life.

(NOTE!!! TO CLARIFY!!! TO UNIVERSALIZE IS NOT THE SAME AS TO LIE, NO MATTER HOW SIMILAR YOU THINK THEY SOUND!!!)

Then they made up their own stories to match a moral of their choosing.

One moral we came up with was "Look ahead."

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Look ahead

One a pound a time there was a lady named Sally. She was very very poor. She had nothing. One day she was walking to the beach like she does everyday. As she was passing this old abandoned school she found one dollar. She said I will and go buy a lottery ticket. The numbers she used was 25, 32, 15, 7, 13, 35. So she went to her shack. Then at 8:00pm she went to the store to see what the numbers was. she saw and she won. She bought a house got married and had some kids.

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I only wish I had time to offer you more moral edification.





(The previous example of student writing can be found at this link.)

6 comments:

  1. Hi. Are you the one whose fiction I read several months ago at Melyngoch's request? You know, the story about the Mormon guy in Provo. . . . If yes, what ever happened with that? Would a more explicit critique than I sent originally still be helpful at this point, or have you succeeded in the world of print?

    If you're not that one, please forgive my wasting your time.

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  2. .

    I am that one, and thank you for asking.

    I have my new proposal all put together complete with the required reviews from unrelated females who owe me no money and it just needs some more tweaking before it can be sent.

    Though I am no longer soliciting reviews, I never say no to additional advice. So if you have something to add, please add!

    (and thank ye again)

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  3. 22 1/2 hours later and I'm still trying to figure out what your student was saying. I have become oddly obsessed with it.

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  4. .

    That's a good question, and by no means do I wish to discount the student's story. I think there is a lot to be learned from a perspective that, from my perspective, is deleriously skewed.

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  5. That is SO awesome. Taken at face value, hilarious. Makes me wish we had the Lottery here.

    Looking a little deeper, not so hilarious. Makes me wonder about the personal lives of your students, and feel very concerned for them.

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  6. .

    I am too. I don't know a lot about them, but we have homelessness and broken families and poverty and no running water and a thousand ailments no child should have to deal with.

    And the glimmer of hope this story gives, however hopeless a hope it may be, makes me a little sad.

    And makes me feel that each day that I do not teach well is one day closer to failure for these kids who need so much more than I have figured out how to give.

    Pathos and humor can be uncomfortably close.

    ReplyDelete