Little but Fierce

Oh my. I just taught my creative writing class. The students are starting their first complete short story, so we were focusing on character development. Part of the lesson involved reading a short chapter about character from Anne Lamott's Bird by Bird. This is a teeny, tiny workshop class--only four students due to a scheduling screw up--so we're very close. Anyway, we start taking turns reading through the chapter, and we get to the section about creating likable narrators. Lamott writes:

If your narrator is someone whose take on things fascinates you, it isn't really going to matter if nothing much happens for a long time. I could watch John Cleese or Anthony Hopkins do the dishes for about an hour without needing much else to happen.

Only the girl reading, a junior, doesn't say "John Cleese." She accidently says, "John Cheese." And for whatever reason, this strikes all of us as unbearably funny. We started to laugh and could. not. stop. I tried to take over the reading, but then they'd start giggling again and I'd lose it. I honestly don't know why "John Cheese" is so funny. The visual, maybe? Then we started inserting references to John Cheese into the rest of the chapter, and it was all over.

Now a person's faults are largely what make him or her likable....Preoccupation with self is good, as is a tendency toward procrastination, self-delusion, darkness, jealousy [or an obsession with Gouda]. They shouldn't be too perfect; perfect means shallow and unreal and fatally uninteresting. I like for them to have a sick sense of humor, [to carve little statues out of sharp Vermont cheddar and give them to their love interests].

Yeah. We didn't get much more done. I'm sure this is nowhere near as funny to anyone outside of our class, but I'm still chortling. This is one of those moments when I think that I have the best job ever.

...this was so cute that I had to share.

It's a cookie cake that one of my students brought in on our last regular day of classes earlier this week. I always told that particular group that despite the fact there were only 14 students in the class, they were my loudest class ever.

In case you can't read the frosting, the cookie cake says, "Your Loudest Class Ever...Thank You, Ms. Taylor."

I really love my job sometimes.

INTRODUCTION
The Greek philosopher Heraclitus said, "It is impossible to step into the same river twice." Though I understood the quote in the abstract, I'd never truly appreciated its full meaning until I canoed down a 40-mile section of the Colorado River with a group of ninth-graders in April 2006.

( Read more... )

If you would like to see pictures of my four-day journey down the Colorado River, you can go here:
Roll #1 and here: Roll #2. The site is password protected. The password is "Taylor" (case sensitive).