HAIRSHIRT
Helping You Get the Most Out of Your Misery
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HAIRSHIRT Helping You Get the Most Out of Your Misery |
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Monday, May 02, 2011Newsies II: The Quickening
My students' knowledge of current events is usually minimal. They don't spend a lot of time reading the newspaper, these fifth-graders. They don't seem to watch all that much news at home, either. But, when something big happens, they often have a handful of assorted facts that are maybe tangentially related to what has happened.
So, this morning, I had a small assortment of kids try to get me off the topic at hand--solving one-step algebraic equations--by bringing up last night's national security-related doings. "Did you hear about the guy who died?" one of them queried. "Mr. Wack, did you know Osama was killed?" said another, using Bin Laden's first name, because he was kinda like Tom and Katie and other celebs and posing the question to me because, obviously, I spend my time away from school in a cryogenic freezing chamber and was waiting for my students to fill me in. Another kid tosses in the tidbit that "...they shot him in the head." This is followed by someone's dad's off-color joke, which I don't hear fully because I'm trying to get the rest of the class quiet so we can continue with the lesson. Now, I don't know that I was fully versed in the goings-on of the world when I was in fifth grade, but I know that I wrote my first topical joke when I was even younger. It was a witty blending of the Action Comics quote "Look, up in the sky, etc." and the plummeting to earth of the abandoned Skylab. I hope that these kids start paying just a bit more attention to shit that matters and a lot less attention to Jersey Shore. Quick post on my kids' weak Osamatalk today.
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