I have a very good friend who teaches high school English in Wichita. We often email each other funny things that we would NEVER email anyone else. Good stuff that either makes us look like dorks or heathens or both. And he keeps me in the loop as to articles from McSweeney‘s I might find interesting. Good guy.
This fine day I got the best email ever from this friend. (We shall refer to him as Mr. T, so as to not invade his privacy as he did mine) Mr T needed a writing excercise for one of his classes this morning. Like any good teacher, he used my blog as inspiration. Borrowing from yesterday’s post, he spurred his students to greatness.
The email is as follows:
I projected this picture in my room and had my students write one-sentence descriptions. Highlights follow the image, in the form of a found poem constructed from their notecards.
Christian and Zachary: A Found Poem by [Mr. T’s] 5th hour sophomores
A man possing for the camera holding a kid.
He looks very, very, very, very, very, very happy.
Goofy, happy, confident, seems responsible, dad looks like he knows what he is doing
He’s a black dude who seems very happy holding his little white baby
A very gleeful man holds his baby boy with a sling
The man in the picture looks scronny and dumb, the child in his arms looks cute
The man looks like a proud father
Tall man, silly smill etched across his face under his nose, his eyes shielded by large black sunglasses and his hands laced around each other, protecting the child cradled between them.
This man look drunk to me
I would say all of the observations have merit, save the last one. I was certainly not drunk. But I might be forced to drown my sorrows if I can’t get over the fact that some kid in Wichita called me “scronny [sic] and dumb”. Or maybe I’ll do another round of pushups and read The Economist when I get home.
Renew and Restore
