February 8, 2013
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The Daily News
1 I love coincidences, as anyone knows.
2 Yesterday morning I wrote about how I thought all day was Friday, right?
3 Later in the day some kid said, "Isn't today Wednesday?"
4 Coincidences. Yeesh.
5 The other day when my sophomores had come in after having taken the California High School Exit Exam, I decided that my students needed a break from all the prepping, grammar, gerunds, and headaches.
6 I told them that I would let them watch a movie, just to rest their heads.
7 I thought I had Vonnegut's Slaughterhouse Five, but when I looked, I couldn't find it. We had just read Vonnegut's Harrison Bergeron, so it seemed good timing.
8 I made a promise that evidently I couldn't keep.
9 I looked into my box of films worthy of discussion, saw Ed TV and thought it might be worthy of philosophical discussion.
10 I also saw The Sixth Sense, which I didn't show during the Heidi/Halloween stories. It's a long story, but I usually show that at the end of the unit as a punctuation mark for my entire ghosts/ myths in literature unit.
11 I thought Ed TV would be more interesting and would move the class forward during this transition from the holidays to Valentine's Day, when I begin Romeo and Juliet.
12 I teach seasonally.
13 I use American marketing to augment my lessons. I've been through that concept before. Why not use advertising to keep my students interested in things?
14 It works.
15 Ed TV would have been a great transition. An entire generation of people are now being filmed every minute of their lives. They know no other way. A camera goes on them and they organically pose.
16 My generation didn't really have that. We got filmed and cameraed also, but not 24/7. We were taught to think about our pose and say of all things, "Cheeeeese!"
17 The newer generation has everyone taking pictures of them constantly, and then posting them all over the web. They have set smiles, and set ways of instantly posing.
18 They still say "Cheeeeese!" in traditional poses, but these guys are professionals at posing, make no mistake. When people take my picture, I never think to stage a smile. I'm usually caught in transition from human being to horse.
19 That's why I thought Ed TV would be an interesting topic for discussion.
20 But Ed TV was on VHS, and my VHS player is about a hundred years old, and is slowing down to a putter.
21 On the other hand, I have a brand new DVD of The Sixth Sense.
22 My challenge is that I don't want to go backwards seasonally. I like to move forward every single day, and put the past in its proper place.
23 When my students came in, I looked at the dusty, faded box that held Ed TV, and I looked at the bright packaging of The Sixth Sense and realized instantly that the latter would serve better.
24 Without hesitation I introduced the students to The Sixth Sense.
25 Suddenly I was hurled back to the entire ghost unit.
26 Things turned strange pretty quickly. The room was cold when I first arrived yesterday, so I set it at sixty-nine, because once I set if for seventy it gets overly warm and muggy.
27 I turned down the lights, put on the film, and everything traveled back three months.
28 About fifteen minutes into the film, my room turned cold. The entire thing became unworldly.
29 Coincidence, I'm quite certain.
30 After the same thing happened with my next class, I had to turn the heater up to seventy-two.
31 My next class came in, and one girl said, "It's so warm in here!" I explained that we had been watching a film about ghosts the past two periods, and that the room had turned cold, and that was the reason it was so nice and warm now.
32 Later in the period, two girls were talking about another girl, and one said, "What is her name?"
33 "Heidi," the other responded.
34 Moving on, part the First: Some fun.
35 I have a hand saw in my room, which I use occasionally for building puppet theaters, or for building mini-sets when my students do skits. That same girl asked me, "Mr. H, why do you have a saw in your room?"
36 My response: "A saw is a story, or saying, which is literary. I also leave things out that foreshadow what I am going to teach. In the typewriter over there, for example, I put a scrapbook entitled 'Hamlet' in it just yesterday. It's a mini-scrapbook that some students worked on in my Shakespeare unit last year. They let me keep it, so I planted it over there because we are going into Shakespeare next week. Valentine's Day. Romeo and Juliet. Midsummer. It's all part of the scheme."
37 "I teach seasonally."
38 She got that.
39 The room remained nicely warm the remainder of the day.
40 I had a nice break after that class, an hour-and-a half. I straigtened up my room, went off campus for a bit to get some lunch, and returned for my last class of the day.
41 Just after the bell rang, a girl who is prone to coincidences came to me with a script she had been working on with students in her drama class.
42 It was a script she and her fellow thespians had put together.
43 It was a rap version of Hamlet.
44 Her desk sits right next to the typewriter with the other Hamlet project on it.
45 Coincidence, I suppose.
46 Sometimes, man.
47 Ah, good times.
48 Moving on, Part the Second: That same period another kid said, "Hey Mr. H, our grammar exercises are about cockroaches!"
49 "Yes?"
50 Some of our classmates think the pronunciation is wrong, and that we should insert some mysterious "a" so that it is pronounced "cacaroach."
51 I put on a wry smile. With no hesitation, I responded with this:
52 "There's a reason I have a job."
53 There sure is.
54 Late.
55 I gottago.
56 Have a wonderful weekend.
57 See you again.
58 Peace.
~H~
www.xanga.com/bharrington
