I have been so busy at school that April
passed me by. I didn’t get a chance to
write about the unusual spring (everything bloomed so fast, because of the warm weather in March). April seemed chilly, because March had been
so warm. And now May’s here. School still sucks, the play’s still
annoying, and we miss Carl so much. The
Madisons have become overbearing, and Wren’s become very sharp with those of us
in the original afterschool group. Mrs.
R. is getting frustrated with bringing us to rehearsals where we just sit
around and get yelled at for being “too loud”.
I mean, what are we supposed to do?
There was one practice that we never even did anything, but Wren
insisted on us being there. What a
joke. I think Mrs. R. was really ticked
off because she’d finished her novel & had NOTHING to do but wait. At least we kids had homework to do.
April 15th was Pascha. I can eat meat again, and Dor’s no longer being teased at lunch. The Tuesday after Pascha (she was off that Monday to go to church) Carl brought in a smallish layer cake, all chocolate with fudge frosting, which he’d made to celebrate Dor’s breaking of the fast. She shared it with our group at lunch. Carl had cleverly decorated it with M&Ms and Oreos. Everyone in the cafeteria saw it, and some kids even asked for a slice.
April 15th was Pascha. I can eat meat again, and Dor’s no longer being teased at lunch. The Tuesday after Pascha (she was off that Monday to go to church) Carl brought in a smallish layer cake, all chocolate with fudge frosting, which he’d made to celebrate Dor’s breaking of the fast. She shared it with our group at lunch. Carl had cleverly decorated it with M&Ms and Oreos. Everyone in the cafeteria saw it, and some kids even asked for a slice.
Dor
handled it magnificently. Whenever
anyone asked for a taste, she solemnly said that she couldn’t give them one,
for “religious reasons.” When Terri, from the popular girls group
asked Dor what that meant, Dor opened her eyes all wide and innocent-like, and
said “According to my beliefs, I can’t break bread with people I don’t trust.”
Nina,
who was standing behind Terri, said the most ridiculous thing after that.
“But
it’s not bread, it’s cake!”
Yeah,
it was classic. It just goes to show how
great an education she’s managing to get at D. S. Whitstone Middle School. Now I know why snobby prep school kids in TV
sitcoms ridicule public school. Perhaps
they have a point.
For the rest of the day, if any of us met up
in the hall, that was our greeting. “But
it’s not bread, it’s cake!” The other kids looked at us as if we were
crazy, but we’re used to that.
The
very last week of April we got our Easter Break. Except they don’t call it Easter Break, like
we did in PA. They call it “Spring
Break” as if we were in college. I guess
it’s another way my new home-state is trying to sanitize Christianity from its
reality. They did give us (Western)
Good Friday off, but that’s probably only because the teacher’s union wouldn’t
allow them to take a day off away from the workers!
In
the few days before “Spring Break”, the teachers seemed to have gone totally
nuts. It’s like they’ve suddenly
realized that the end school close, and they have to step it up in order to get
as much of the curriculum in as their original lesson plans said they
would. They began giving out assignments
galore to do on our vacation. We all
planned to do some of the work together, and doing it at my house was preferred,
because Aunt Lina was at home.
Ruby,
Amelia and Carl all have Miss Joilee (remember her from testing?) for homeroom
or “Language Arts” (which used to be known as Grammar and Literature in
Pennsylvania). They came by with Dor, on
the first day of vacation, and Carl was complaining about an assignment he’d
been given.
“She
says she wants us to be creative, but then when I am, she sucks all of the fun
and creativity out of any assignment I write, with her damned purple pen.”
“I
know!” exclaimed Amelia, as she grabbed another cookie off of the platter Aunt
Lina had set out. “I hate that purple
pen. It’s made me hate reading my little
brother’s favorite story to him anymore!”
“Harold
and the Purple Crayon is your brother’s favorite book?” asked Aunt
Lina, looking up from her computer. “I
love the artwork! I was sad when Randi
grew tired of picture-books. Some of the
best American art is in picture-books.
Like the late Maurice Sendak, may he rest in peace. I loved his illustrations ever since I read Chicken
Soup With Rice. ”
“I
know,” said Dor, smiling. “I still have
this miniature set of Sendak’s…in a little box. It was my Mother’s, and she got
it from my Godmother, Aunt Polly. My
favorite story is Pierre, the boy who would only say “NO!”
“Mine
too!” laughed Aunt Lina.
We
were all sitting in the kitchen, and Aunt Lina was on a stool at the counter,
drinking tea and typing. Usually she’s
in her studio painting or crafting, but today she was playing the responsible
adult, so she had on jeans without paint stains, and was at the computer,
sometimes listening in our griping.
“So
what kind of assignments does this teacher give, Carl, and what does she
consider “wrong” with your work?"
"It’s
not just my work that she finds wrong, it’s the fact that I’m a male. I guess she thinks that boys can’t be as
imaginative as girls. I swear if a boy
and a girl submitted the exact same essay, she’d automatically grade the boy
lower! And that makes it hard for me to
even care about her assignments any more, if I can’t get a high grade anyway."
“Well,
that’s not nice! I’m really surprised at
how much school has changed since….well, since I went. Is this an honors class? According to some of
the mothers I’ve spoken to, taking an “honors” class means your child will not
get an A because teachers can’t give
A’s for honors classes. It would boost a
kid’s GPA too much. So even if a child is capable of earning a grade, they can’t
earn it, because it won’t be given. Ridiculous, if true….ooh! My friend Tom
Patrickson is a writer – you may have heard of him. He’s online right now & I sort-of wrote
to him about your teacher complaint, as we were talking…”
“Whoa!”
exclaimed Ruby, “You don’t mean the Thomas Patrickson, author of Shoot
or Die, and Redskin in Red Square, do you?”
“Yes,
that’s Tom.”
“Cool!”
said Ruby.
“No
way!” put in Carl.
“Well,
Tom’s kinda having writer’s block, and just told me he’d love to only have to
worry about what some stupid teacher thought.
Why don’t we give him one of your assignments from Miss Joilee? It could be amusing,” she said, clicking at
the keys on her laptop.
“You’re
kidding, right?” asked Carl. “Joilee
hates guys – no male in any of her classed has ever gotten higher than a
B-. She’ll purple pen him!”
“Then
you will have proven your point, right?” asked Aunt Lina. “This is a real life lesson, not a school
lesson. Think of it like a science
lab. How can you prove your theory to be
right? Let’s devise an experiment. If Tom agrees, let him do two papers, of the
same assignment. Write one essay as a
girl, and one as a boy. Let’s see what
the grade is.”
Aunt
Lena was typing furiously. My friends
and I were chuckling at the thought of fooling a teacher. Aunt Lina hit one last key, then sat back and
sighed.
“Let’s
see if he’ll do it.”
We
didn’t anticipate an immediate answer, and so we just kept on working on our
homework. We had expected to be
practicing for the play, but Wren had sent us e-mails saying the practice time
had changed from 3:30 to 7, and Mrs. Z. called to tell us that she would pick
us all (except Carl) up after dinner for the late rehearsal.
Then
Aunt Lina let out a “Whoo-hoo” that made us all jump.
“Tom’s
up for it, guys! He’ll do an essay for
your teacher, just to see how he’d be graded.
I’ve got to e-mail him the info, and he’ll send me two essays. He’s going to work on it tonight, and he’ll
use different fonts and spacing on each assignment so it will look legit. But you have to promise not to tell anyone. If you
do, he’ll deny any involvement. Plus it
makes me look bad. Is that OK?”
Of
course, we all agreed.
So
Carl sat down at Aunt Lina’s computer & asked a NY Times
bestselling author to help conduct an experiment….
Dor
and Ruby were helping Amelia with her math, and discussing the upcoming choir
competition at a South Jersey amusement park. I hadn’t been involved in much of
the group’s fundraising, and had been wondering if it was worth attending.
“After
we’re done singing, we have the rest of the day to go on the rides, and in the
late afternoon, they announce the trophy winners. It’s so cool; they’ve got the best coasters,
and last year it was so hot that we went on the splashdown ride & were dry
in less than a half-hour,” said Carl.
“I
want to go on Odin’s Thunderbolt. It’s
the biggest looping rollercoaster on the East Coast!” declared Ruby.
The
rest of the afternoon we goofed off in the backyard, listening to music. We had an early dinner, after my friends
left, because of the play rehearsal.
Mrs. R came by at 6:30. And we got to a local church basement (yes,
another site for practice) in time to see everyone coming out of the
building. Was it a fire drill?
No, we
were informed rehearsal was OVER.
Huh?
Wren
was even asking us why we had ignored her e-mail.
First
of all, let me tell you about that e-mail from Wren about rehearsal times
changing. Apparently, what she had meant
to say was that rehearsal time had changed from the usual 4:00 -to-6:00
time to a 3:30 –to-7 rehearsal. So when Mrs. R drove us over at 7, the
rehearsal was ending! And all because Wren had not used proper
English, or taken the time to clarify her meaning, or even read over her e-mail before hitting
“send”.
The
funny thing is, the misunderstanding seemed limited to those of us from White
Cedars. All of us agreed that the e-mail
was unclear. Saying the time had
“changed from 3:30 to 7”
implied that rehearsal time used to be 3:30
but now was 7. Amelia’s mom, Aunt Lina and the other parents all agreed. But Wren said (in her nasty little voice that
meant she was right, and you
were, obviously, stupid) that it should have been clear that the rehearsal, which usually started at 4, was changed to 3:30.
Except
the non-stars weren’t always supposed to show up at 4! We extras were always given different times
to show up, so that Antonio, the director, could work with the singers &
dancers separately.
Mrs. R
was livid when Wren treated her like an idiot for misreading her poorly
composed e-mail. She was so mad that she
asked Wren if she understood the fundamentals of the English language. How else could ALL of the White Cedars
parents & kids understand her e-mail to mean the same thing …a
three-and-a-half-hour change in the start of rehearsal? Wren insisted her e-mail was perfectly clear,
because all of her stars had shown up
on time. Mrs. R told us to get back in
the car, and drove us home. During the
whole trip home, she kept saying that if we hadn’t invested several months of
our time in this damn play, she’d pull Amelia out & advise everyone else to
do the same. She was so upset!
And as
we were leaving, I noticed that Wren’s mouth was puckered up like she’d been
sucking lemons. This did not bode well….
Needless
to say, rehearsals have become very
tense. Wren is icily polite to Mrs.
R. And Mrs. R just laughs it off,
throwing off comments about the lack of a proper education in Language Arts
that some towns have….
Once
our Spring Vacation was over, we went back to DSW Middle school & handed in
our assignments....both of Mr. Patrickson’s essays were different, and the guy
really did try to think like a girl for one and like a boy for the other. The experiment was a “success”-- Amelia got
an A- and Carl got a C-. It doesn’t help
Carl improve his grade, but it proves that he’s right -- Ms. Joilee is
prejudiced against boys.
Oh! And Tom Patrickson asked Aunt Lina to mail
him the graded essays. It seems that our
little deception gave him an idea for a non-fiction article, about the state of
education in the US today…
Carl
told Aunt Lina that if Mr. Patrickson needed to ask questions of those of us
“in the trenches” he’d be very willing to have a conversation on Skype. Carl still can’t get over the fact that a
best-selling author got a C- from Miss Joilee.
Well,
this post is longer than I intended & I still have so much to write about!
Until
my next post…
Randi
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