I'm getting some great essays from my sixth graders:

A Sentient Object


Patrick:

I hear people crying. Why? I can not move. I do not hear this person's heart beating. Is my person dead? I do not know.
I see some light. I guess the skin of my dead person is wearing away. I am being exposed to the sun.
Many years have passed. I do not know how many. However, I can not see the sun anymore. Layers of land have covered me over time. Winds have blown thrown land over me, burying me. Vines and other plants have grown over that layer of land. Glaciers covered up the plants. The ice melted, but more land has come on top of the second layer of land. I am now very deep in the earth.
More years passed. My guess would be more than five millenias [sic]. Huh? What is that stick? It is digging away all the layers of land that have buried me. A hand that looks similar to my person's hand is touching me and feeling me and inspecting me.
"Hey Crispin! Come over here!" yelled the human.
Another human comes. They are both intrigued by me. I am satisfied with my current life, but I think this is a turn in my life. I am probably going to become famous. I know I will be inspected. Humans are so curious these days.
The human is putting me into a bag. He does this very delicately. I am being driven to a building that reads "The New York History Museum." I am being given to another human. This human is inspecting me.
My life has not changed much since that day. Day after day is constant inspection. Huh? Finally! I am being displayed in this place. They put me in a glass case. People from all over the world are coming to see me. I am famous! My life-long dream has come true. I am now living in this glass case, being treated like a king. This a great life. I predict that I will live like this until I become of no use to the humans,
I am now lost. I am now forgotten by humans. However, this will not last long. Soon, my life, the life of the skull of a prehistoric human, will repeat and be luxurious once again.


Excerpts:

Richard:

I am an object that impatiently waits for someone to pick me up and purchase me. … I am, unfortunately, nothing by a mass of pages binded [sic] to a spine. … I love to be written all over, since it shows that my owner loves me and tries to make the best while I last.
I was manufactured by a kind man. I was first printed, ink filling each of my single pages. I then was neatly arranged in order and stiched [sic] onto my friends who help me stay safe from gloomy weathers. …
I have evolved greatly. … My ancestors were exotic scrolls and parchments kept safely in containers, for things objects like me were scarce. Now there are too many of me and my owners [are] careless of my future for they could always replace me. …
I am the always evolving book.


Jun:

I am gray. I am usually round. I can weigh an ounce and I also can weight 100 pounds. I come in many sizes. In the bible [sic], Jacob sleeps using me as a pillow when he runs away from Esau for taking a blessing from his father. It should have been Esau's. The blessing is who will be the chief of the tribe.
In the new testament [sic], the name of Jesus's disciple Peter means my name. I am uncomfortable if you want to use me as a pillow.
… Also in the bible, David uses me in his slingshot and throws me on Goliath's forehead and Goliath dies.


Jasmine:

… The girl reached and grabbed me. I was afraid, but a little bit happy. I have heard legends about famous siblings who got picked up, and [were] never seen again. The girl dropped me into something dark. When I looked up, she had closed the sky.
… When the sky opened once more, the girl picked me up again. Then she pointed me straight down. All the blood rushed to my head.
…I am a pen. Not much, but I am important.


Matthew:

Sometimes I feel sad that I can't be free like all the other creatures of the dessert [sic]. All I can do is watch life go by me. And there will be no time in the future for me to wish any longer, because one day the sand of the desserts will turn into roads. After that the dunes will turn into little homes. The next thing you know, everything will turn into buildings and industrialization.
One thing that makes me feel good about being a cactus is that although I am not able to cause a great impact on the dessert, some people think of me as a historical monument.




A Teacher Who Changed Me

Jun:

Outline

I am talking
Ms. Rennert
conceited
dumb
selfish
mean

A teacher that changed my life was a teacher named Ms. Rennert. She always wore jewlery and bragged every day. She never taught us anything either. She said to just do pages in her workbook. If we didn't understand she would just ask the smart people in the class to help us.

She was very mean. She didn't let us use the bathroom. She allowed drinks in winter but not in summer. She was wrong most of the time. If we said that she was wrong she would punish us. She made up lies and did dumb things that made us laugh secretly. If we laughed and she caught us she would yell. One time she brought a nail clipper and clipped her toe nails.

We all used binders to do our subjects. One time she saw me and four other kids doing work in our binders and she yelled at us for using binders not notebooks. She said she told us to bring notebooks but she never did. It wasn't on the supply list either. She changed me by making me happier to go to school the next year. All my teachers taught us things but Ms. Rennert was the only one who didn't. So I was much happier to go to school the next year and all the other years. I was happy because the teachers actually taught things and weren't mean like Ms. Rennert. Another thing Ms. Rennert did was eat our food. She was obsessed with food. She was very skinny but ate a lot of junk food. When we had chips or cookies, she would eat it. One time at a birthday party she ate all the chips and took the cheese off all the pizza slices and ate it. The pizza was nasty after that. She used to search our bookbags for food. Ms. Rennert did change me though. She made me happy to go to school next year and the year after that. Now I am still happy to go to school knowing that nobody will ever be like Ms. Rennert.


Excerpts:

Diana:
Throughout grades one to five, my class and I never really learned to appreciate social studies. Yes, we had fun making posters of Indians in third grade, but love it… never. Making us read documents of the constitution and the preamble, I learned to love and enjoy everything in store for me. Currently, in sixth grade, I am learning about Egypt and Mesopotamia, and all the interesting facts now leave me in a daze.
After a splendid fourth grade with her, she asked me to be her moniter. With grateful eyes I told her yes. … For a "thank you" gift in Christmas, she gave me a whole make-up set. Although I would have rather gotten something else, it was more than enough.


An essay on a significant age:


Excerpts:

Diana:
With my six-year-old body, I trudged through the vast halls of my new school.
Our teacher, Mrs. Allen, was a welcoming one. She understood our feelings and our melancholiness about leaving our friends from kindergarten.


Richard:
I was afraid that my new teacher would be malicious towards me and that my fellow pupils would despise me.


Patrick:
When I was seven I played all the time. Now that I have matured, I understand that playing is not everything, but back then playing was really very important to me.

From The New Republic:

After her widely ridiculed "listening tour" of the Middle East you would have thought that public diplomacy czar Karen Hughes learned a thing or two. But there she was in Indonesia last week, on the next leg of her campaign to improve America's image in the Muslim world, making the same mistakes all over again. There were the same patronizing and vacuous statements: "My state of Texas is very big," she told students at an elite Jakarta university. "So you can imagine my surprise to learn that your country, Indonesia, is three time bigger than my big state of Texas."

Cp.:

From the San Francisco Chronicle:

At one point, da Silva even exhibited a map of his country, which is larger than the continental United States. "Wow! Brazil is big," Amorim quoted the U.S. president as responding.

I think these comments are very revealing.

Last year when I was looking for a room I met some very unusual types. One was a man who maintained (not implausibly) that the fall of the Austro-Hungarian Empire had been the indirect cause of all the catastrophes of the twentieth century. His sitting room was a shrine to Austria-Hungary. (I'm sure you can picture it.)

One woman's e-mail username was something like "peregrinefalcon." "Are you fond of falcons?" I asked. "Yes, I am. In fact, I'm a falconer." I gaped. Falconers still exist?! In New York City?! She explained that falcons are the best way to scare away small birds at the airport. I couldn't help picturing her in medieval or Renaissance garb, and to imagine her like that, with her big glove and her falcon, in the bleak landscape of an airport — it's too much.

I was studying Latin on the subway, and an old woman* sitting next to me drew me out of my book & began reminiscing about her years studying Latin in high school. "I went to an all-girls school." The second before I asked her, I knew what the answer would be: she had gone to my high school — had graduated in 1939. "The French teachers were fantastic. Whenever I forget a French word, all I have to do is remember Miss —, and it comes back to me… Eleanor Roosevelt spoke to us." "Oh! When I graduated, we were told that 60 — or 70 — years before Franklin Delano Roosevelt had given the graduation speech on that very same stage." "Miss Verplank [or Vanderplank?] of the Verplanks was our Latin teacher." I looked blank here. Who were the Verplanks? Are they in an Edith Wharton novel? "She dressed in purple from head to toe." Just like Mrs. Wilson! I wanted to say, but held my tongue, because I wanted to hear more. (I learned in high school that Woodrow Wilson's wife took to wearing purple toward the end of his life, and she attributed some of her influence to the power of purple.) Maybe Miss Verplank just wanted to wear the school color. "The only man in the school was the janitor. Once a troupe of actors visited to play Shakespeare, and when the lead actor strode onto the stage we all sighed in unison. Afterwards the headmistress gave us a talking to: 'Girls, you must not behave like that.'" At Union Square, unfortunately, she got off the train. I was headed for my Latin class, and when I got there I told the teacher — who also went to my high school — about my chance encounter on the subway.

* I realize "old woman" is a blunt phrase, & I considered changing it to something else, but all the alternatives seemed clunky and idiotic. If we say "young woman," why not "old woman"? Is it so terrible to be old? She certainly carried it off well.

I usually feel inconspicuous in the city, but recently two things happened to disabuse me of this notion:

On the subway, I was sitting next to a woman who was writing furiously in a notebook. She would often glance up, and I suspected she was taking notes. So, as discreetly as possible, I took a peek at the notebook: "a woman with a green bowling bag sitting next to me." Oh my God! That's me! What else does she say? But just then she shut the notebook and got up for her stop. (Also: I hadn't know my bag was a bowling bag.)

Another time I was going home late at night, and half the subway lines weren't working, so I had to walk about fifteen blocks in the homestretch. It was very late — past one, I think. The streets were absolutely deserted, and I was a bit scared; luckily there was a 24-hour grocery store every five blocks or so. At one point, I noticed a police car. Three blocks later I glanced back, and there it still was — it was trailing me! When I turned onto my cross-street the police car couldn't follow me, because it's a one-way street, but its siren warbled goodbye. (You know the friendly, cartoonish sound sirens can make — "blurp.")

More on Sunrise:

In a self-service café in the city, the husband is trying to win back his wife's trust: he goes off to the counter and comes back to their table with a plate piled high with pastries for her. He sets it down before her and waits, anxiously, hands clasped, for her to eat. She puts a pastry in her mouth mechanically, but before she can bite down she bursts into tears again, and soon she's sobbing, with her mouth full of cake.

That moment rang so true I thought, "Why haven't I seen that before in a movie? This is what life is all about!"

There were so many wonderful scenes and sequences like that in Sunrise, some funnier, some more tragic, none so perfectly balanced in complicated innocence.

Figures of speech:

my arthritic umbrella

in a building under demolition: the staircase sagged like a slack accordion

Something I was reading with an eighth grade class mentioned the Iliad. "What's the Iliad?" I asked. Nobody knew (they're not the best class), but one boy made some valiant attempts: "It's about the Battle of Marathon between the Greeks & the Persians!" "No." "It's about that blind old man and his daughter." "No." "Oh! I know! The war between Athens and its rival, that other Greek city..."

The other day I asked my seventh grade, "Who's a good author if you want to read about Greek mythology?" I hoped someone would mention Edith Hamilton, and was astonished when Kevin called out, "Robert Graves!" I like Kevin; he slouches and looks half asleep, but he's actually alert and curious and hard-working, and good-natured too. The other day Mrs. K, passing by, moved my seventh graders around (quite unnecessarily — they're very well-behaved), and Kevin, who had been moved to the center of a row, wailed, "The wall! I can't concentrate without the wall!" (He leans against it.)

I was impressed when Kevin mentioned Robert Graves, & was reminded of another moment with another student (whom I taught, coincidentally, in the same room). This student, a high school junior, told me that within the space of a few months he had gone from being a "hard-line anti-revisionist Marxist-Leninist" to being a skinhead. Naturally I was speechless. We talked, and I mentioned Rosa Luxemburg, and the movie of her life. Joon: "I haven't seen the movie, but I've read some of Rosa Luxemburg's writings." !!! I hadn't read anything by Rosa Luxemburg!!! (Still haven't!) We ended up reading George Orwell's Homage to Catalonia; he seemed to like it. (He later told me that he was a non-racist skinhead; in an essay he tried to explain his trajectory: he became a Marxist-Leninist when he saw how terrible working conditions were in the factories of his grandfather's friends; he didn't have much of an explanation for his subsequent transformation.)

I'm not making this up: a biophysicist has written a paper on "The physics of running in children who have just learned to walk." That must have been fun to research.

The Trial and Execution of Robert Brasillach made a big impression on me; it's a really gripping book. Kaplan gives Brasillach's address (among others), and since I was in Paris when I finished the book, I checked out the building. Naturally, there was nothing in its innocent and cheerful façade to suggest that a vicious fascist, winner of literary prizes, had once lived there. What did I expect? Brasillach lived with his sister and brother-in-law, and someone with his brother-in-law's last name still lives at the address Kaplan gives.