Author Emulation
3/19/09
‘A’ assignment; I am writing a short description of school life in the style of Hawthorne. This means I want to put a lot of detail into every sentence and use words that fit with his time period, if possible.
A great modern building, surrounded, naturally, by a large parking lot and extensive fields for sporting events, can be found near the intersection of 136th avenue and Zuni, streets which are ill-fitted for the quantity vehicles which daily are forced through their cramped arteries as they voyage towards to work or to the building, which is named Legacy High School. For the students blessed with the ready availability of a working automobile and the legal documentation which allows them to drive while still following the law, the day begins before the sun has decreed it daytime, and they must often depart from their residences a half-hour before school has begun, in order to avoid or otherwise navigate the unseemly number of vehicles which clog the streets. At 7:15 a bell rings which notifies the students, if they are awake enough to be conscious of the noise, that school is in session and that they must remain in their classrooms for the duration of the period, which is roughly an hour, and generally consists of a lesson plan concocted by a teacher, but occasionally gives students the opportunity to work on whatever work they did not complete while at home. The day continues in this manner, one period lined up after another, and students continue along their unique and individualized paths until the school day has ended. What happens next varies greatly, depending upon the student; he or she may be involved in activities after school, or else the student may wish to visit with peers, or even journey home, perhaps to work on assignments, but more likely to waste a good deal of precious time on social networking sites.
Author Emulation:
Eudora Welty
2/24/09
I learned more in Brehm’s class in seventh grade than I did in any other social studies class. It wasn’t the kind of learning that came from books and memorization, it was the kind that comes from discussions and conversations and stays with you for life. I remember precious few facts that I might have been supposed to learn that year, and what I do remember is fascinating but random: sickle-cell anemia means that your red blood cells are shaped like sickles, or crescent moons; chimpanzees don’t have opposable thumbs, as most people think; the fertile crescent was the cradle of civilization; hoovervilles, or shantytowns, cropped up during the Great Depression and were named after then-President, Herbert Hoover.
We sat with our desks rarely in rows, and often students could be found in bean bags or on the floor. The left wall was entirely covered in books and educational magazines, among them Uncle Tom’s Cabin, Archeo Anthropology, Lies My Teacher Told Me, and countless issues of National Geographic. On Mr. Brehm’s desk were projects that students had turned in from the current year and years passed. They ranged from miniature catapults and trebuchets to poems written in Japanese. If a student did not want to learn the material that the rest of the class was learning, they could do an independent project, provided they completed it in a certain time frame, did real research, and learned something.
We never called Brehm “Mr. Brehm,” although we should have. We referred to him and thought of him as Brehm, or sometimes even Ken. This was not out of disrespect, but out of a feeling of familiarity, of friendship. Brehm never seemed to care; he wasn’t like other teachers. He had hair that reached his waist, and joked with us that when he started to go bald he would comb it over to cover the bald spots. Every day there was a discussion of something; I remember talking about how some economists thought that there would be another depression soon, thought I didn’t realize at the time what that actually meant. We discussed topics that some teachers won’t touch—drugs, STDs. Long before he was a teacher, Brehm was one of the people who emptied trash cans—a trash man, and he had more interesting stories than nearly anyone.
Despite his oddities, I never doubted that Brehm cared deeply about us—all of us. There was an indecent when a kid passed out on the playground because he had been playing a game with other students. The game involved cutting off the flow of blood to the brain, which was supposed to cause a feeling of euphoria and even visions. The kid passed out and could have been hurt. When our lit teacher addressed us as a class, she was angry. When Brehm stood before us, he barely held back tears. I could hear the fear and anger and especially the relief in his voice. No one was hurt. And after seeing Brehm’s reaction, I am sure that no one ventured to play that game again. Because when he asked us not to risk it, he was not giving us an order. Brehm was showing us how our actions can—and will, and do—affect other people. It was written clearly in his expression.
Author Emulation:
Annie Dillard–a character Sketch
January 28, 2009
One evening when I was still in elementary school, my sister overheard my brother trying to convince me to say the words, “I’m a man.” Thinking it funny and seeing my reluctance to say them, she said loudly, “I’m a man!” I was shocked. Years later my sister, Maureen, but called Mo, and I still remember the moment. Any day when one of us needs cheering, the words “I’m a man” will usually do the trick.
We were watching television together once when an underwear commercial featuring an attractive male model came on. “Mo,” I said, trying my utmost not to laugh, “that’s you.” Two days later was my birthday. The card she gave to me had a crayon drawing of muscled, beefy man. The caption read simply, “Happy Birthday to a beautiful man. PS that drawing is you.”
Mo is five-and-a-half years my senior and my best friend. Her quirky ideas about god, boys, food, and the universe have affected me greatly. When she was in high school, she stopped eating meat—and I eventually did the same. For a short time, she was a devout Christian. Although I gave it up sooner, I, too was religious for a short time. Mo said to me once, “No one else exists. You probably just made them up. So don’t feel guilty when you don’t like people back. Sometimes that’s how it goes.” Her idea that no one else is real stands in conflict with her adamant belief in human rights, her hate of oppression and government, her belief that people are more than the sum of their possessions.
I told her a dream in which the boy I liked and I were together. She told me that she thought that dreams were real, but that they happened on a different plane. “I wish it was this plane,” I said.
“I know, Mollsie,” she said. “But you should just be happy that the you on the different plane is with him. Maybe that Molly is dreaming of being with someone better, and that will happen soon here.” I never could quite manage to be happy for the ‘other Molly’ or to believe that my dreams were real, but her optimism was contagious.
In an attempt to look more like sisters, I cut my hair, died it brown, and convinced her to buy blue contacts. But though born sisters, it was never our fate to look related; Mo is taller, her hair is straighter and darker, her eyes almond-shaped and brown, while I am shorter, with wavy blonde hair and wide blue eyes—and hair dye and blue contacts can’t change that. Our minds work in different ways, but we are nearly always in tune to each other.
Jason said,
February 7, 2009 @ 7:48 pm
Hey, just a little tip on your design, and no offense is intended – it is kind of difficult to read that lighter colored text on a white background. It strains the eyes.