The best laid plans often run awry through no fault of our
own. I decide after three days of
teaching O. Henry that the kids clearly are not mentally ready to make the
inferences and leaps necessary. I was at
their age; I was also reading Saki and Ring Lardner and Shirley Jackson (and
Hawthorne, Faulkner, Twain, Shakespeare, Thurber…). Not many 'tweens are ready to digest written
sarcasm, but I had been raised in a house where Monty Python's Flying Circus
and Jean Shepherd's America were required weekly viewing. Reading satire was not a stretch for me
Early in the week we read "After Twenty Years,"
and most of the students fail to make the connection that two characters, young
friend Jimmy Wells and older patrolman Jimmy Wells, are the same person albeit
twenty years different in age. I thought
for sure the identical name would be a dead giveaway, but you know what they
say happens when we assume. The class
encounters a similar problem watching the abbreviated video "Jimmy
Valentine," an exact reenactment of the short story "A Retrieved
Reformation" in which a notorious safe cracker who is avoiding another
stint in prison must decide whether to stay hidden behind an alias as a
reformed man or blow his cover and rescue a child locked in a bank vault.
After discussions and worksheets and questions and journal
entries, Friday is the day we are supposed to finish graphing the story. From the few graphs that have already been
completed, I see that I need to re-teach what "fully engaged in the
conflict" means, and I'm quite certain that whatever I go over today will
not stick inside their cherubic brains through vacation until January 3rd.
I need a new game plan -- I huddle and hike.
I have several versions of winter word searches, winter
crosswords puzzles, and winter color-by-number.
Yes, you read that right - color by number. Along with those activities, I have an old
video of The Muppet Christmas Carol. Perfect!
We just finished Gaines' play version of the Dickens holiday classic. I turn off half the lights and throw in the
video only to discover that older videotapes do not work properly on newer
VCRs.
No problem -- I'll make a lateral pass.
I have the George C. Scott version of A Christmas Carol on DVD. I put
the disk into the slot and hit play. It's
very dark, and I have to turn off the remainder of the lights, which is going
to be a problem for me as it's rainy and dark outside, and I need to correct
papers. After about fifteen minutes, I
realize the sound quality of the DVD (or the machine) makes listening to the
movie while chatting quietly about the word searches an impossible task. I turn the lights back on and say, "Don't
worry, I have a back-up to my back-up plan."
Last chance -- I'm going for the Hail Mary throw downfield.
A brief Google search quickly yields me what I need: Mister Magoo's Christmas Carol. I'll
be perfectly honest with you people: The
same snob who spouted about reading classic satirists a few paragraphs ago is
the same pseudo-snob whose first exposure to the Dickens classic was this very
version, Mister Magoo's Christmas Carol.
I manage to finagle the speakers (loose
wire) and project onto the Smartboard screen the cartoon version. This is actually the most practical of all
possible options since the Muppet movie runs ninety minutes, the Scott version
runs one hundred minutes, and Magoo's version is about fifty-four minutes, an
entire class period. At least if any
administrators should stick their heads into my classroom, my kids are on task
and following the curriculum … so to speak.
That in itself is kind of ironic.
If irony were ice cream, it would be my favorite flavor, and
I would weigh eight-hundred pounds.
