Tuesday, December 05, 2006
An Extra with Year 7s in the Artroom
I'm covering a class of four leftover year 7s. They are the bad kids who weren't allowed to go to the museum with everyone else. One of them has just painted himself purple. I probably should have spotted this before he covered himself up to the elbows.
Friday, December 01, 2006
Last one for the week... (Mininovels Part Two)
Today has been spent writing reports. At least, that's how it was supposed to be spent, being 'report writing (from home) day', but I've regrettably discovered a crucial part of the new report writing programme is missing from my iBook. So, damn it, I had to go out for cheap pizza instead. Nonetheless, I've been wading through some Mininovels that should have been marked some time ago, which has occasionally been chucklesome.
Some highlights:
"im so excited" said Brad, who was obviously excited.
and there's T's, an opus about going to live on the moon, which ends with the classic line:
So we had figured out how to make air and food, now we just needed to work out what to do with our shit and piss and stuff.
It's true, you would need to work that out. Probably best to do it before you go (to the moon), but still...
My street has a dark gloomy bat like court at the end of it. And that’s where the so called witch lives.
This is actually quite a strong introduction, despite the fact that it boggles the mind to imagine how a court can be bat-like, but the story immediately veers off into describing motorbikes and then, bizarrely, contains an entire page copied and pasted from the BBC News site about motorcycles being stolen in London. In his favour, this unrelated aside is prefaced by the words "I picked up a newspaper and read..." in a desperate attempt to up the word count. I suppose it's lucky he didn't just write at the beginning "I picked up a book and read 'It was the best of times, it was the worst of times...'" etc. etc. After this crucial update on overseas thievery, it's back to the action as our narrator tells us "I took a piss and washed my face and hands." Hopefully that was intended as three successive actions, rather than the one.
Most of the stories written by the boys are still about each other, although in my second year 9 class they are more about killing each other. Horribly. And graphically. The worst was a boy whose novel begins with him killing his dad after his dad tells him "Don't be such a pussy, you shouldn't be fucking other guys' hoes if you're not man enough." He then stabs his dad with various implements, throws him down a hole and burns off his face. Then, most bizarrely, he grates cheese onto his dad's burned face so that it melts across it. Further killings of anyone who ever pissed him off ensue. I couldn't read it all but quickly passed it on to the social worker.
That said, some of the boys have done some truly outstanding work, as have several of the girls. One girl wrote 22,000 words instead of the required 4,000 and all of them were good. The depth of understanding in many of them is truly astounding for children of their age. But those aren't so chucklesome, alas.
I'll leave you with a further excerpt from T's novel, detailing the arrival on the moon. It's actually quite inventive in a mundane sort of way...
Everyone starts to talk to each other asking what was there thoughts in the last 10 seconds, how were you feeling now, what do you think it would be like on the moon, questions about them on earth like how old were they, what did they work for, do u have a boy friend/girlfriend, things they liked doing, did they have any pets and stuff like that just to get to know each other because they didn’t really get to know each other on earth, because of all the test and training they had to do to qualify to go up to the moon and live and have lots and lots and years and years of fun. The captain said to us “this is your captain speaking the trip to the moon will be another nine hours and ten minutes to we reach the moon.”
The rest of the journey seemed to take forever because some were excited some were nervous and some were both excited and nervous. Finally they can see the big dome where they were going to live for the rest of their life. As they get closer to the moon they can see inside like all the little houses and the food stores and stuff like that. The dome has two layers of the big dome because if the inside cracks in the inside one the outside will stop everything from sucking out so they can fix it. The ship starts to slow down as it approaches the air lock every second that goes by the ship gets slower and slower, everyone is getting very excited and nervous, wondering what type of things there would be to do on the moon like bowling and stuff like that and if there was Mc Donald’s and stuff like that.
One of the questions that is going around is what do we do if there were any aliens on the moon the answer always is there is no such thing as aliens or there are no aliens on the moon.
Some highlights:
"im so excited" said Brad, who was obviously excited.
and there's T's, an opus about going to live on the moon, which ends with the classic line:
So we had figured out how to make air and food, now we just needed to work out what to do with our shit and piss and stuff.
It's true, you would need to work that out. Probably best to do it before you go (to the moon), but still...
My street has a dark gloomy bat like court at the end of it. And that’s where the so called witch lives.
This is actually quite a strong introduction, despite the fact that it boggles the mind to imagine how a court can be bat-like, but the story immediately veers off into describing motorbikes and then, bizarrely, contains an entire page copied and pasted from the BBC News site about motorcycles being stolen in London. In his favour, this unrelated aside is prefaced by the words "I picked up a newspaper and read..." in a desperate attempt to up the word count. I suppose it's lucky he didn't just write at the beginning "I picked up a book and read 'It was the best of times, it was the worst of times...'" etc. etc. After this crucial update on overseas thievery, it's back to the action as our narrator tells us "I took a piss and washed my face and hands." Hopefully that was intended as three successive actions, rather than the one.
Most of the stories written by the boys are still about each other, although in my second year 9 class they are more about killing each other. Horribly. And graphically. The worst was a boy whose novel begins with him killing his dad after his dad tells him "Don't be such a pussy, you shouldn't be fucking other guys' hoes if you're not man enough." He then stabs his dad with various implements, throws him down a hole and burns off his face. Then, most bizarrely, he grates cheese onto his dad's burned face so that it melts across it. Further killings of anyone who ever pissed him off ensue. I couldn't read it all but quickly passed it on to the social worker.
That said, some of the boys have done some truly outstanding work, as have several of the girls. One girl wrote 22,000 words instead of the required 4,000 and all of them were good. The depth of understanding in many of them is truly astounding for children of their age. But those aren't so chucklesome, alas.
I'll leave you with a further excerpt from T's novel, detailing the arrival on the moon. It's actually quite inventive in a mundane sort of way...
Everyone starts to talk to each other asking what was there thoughts in the last 10 seconds, how were you feeling now, what do you think it would be like on the moon, questions about them on earth like how old were they, what did they work for, do u have a boy friend/girlfriend, things they liked doing, did they have any pets and stuff like that just to get to know each other because they didn’t really get to know each other on earth, because of all the test and training they had to do to qualify to go up to the moon and live and have lots and lots and years and years of fun. The captain said to us “this is your captain speaking the trip to the moon will be another nine hours and ten minutes to we reach the moon.”
The rest of the journey seemed to take forever because some were excited some were nervous and some were both excited and nervous. Finally they can see the big dome where they were going to live for the rest of their life. As they get closer to the moon they can see inside like all the little houses and the food stores and stuff like that. The dome has two layers of the big dome because if the inside cracks in the inside one the outside will stop everything from sucking out so they can fix it. The ship starts to slow down as it approaches the air lock every second that goes by the ship gets slower and slower, everyone is getting very excited and nervous, wondering what type of things there would be to do on the moon like bowling and stuff like that and if there was Mc Donald’s and stuff like that.
One of the questions that is going around is what do we do if there were any aliens on the moon the answer always is there is no such thing as aliens or there are no aliens on the moon.
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