Three More Days

I can do anything for three more days, right? Well, make that 1 more full day and 2 more half days. The end of the year is always very bitter sweet. I can not wait to be done with the year and get a nice break, but I actually really liked all of my kids this year - even if they weren't all that impressed with me. I just found out that one of my freshmen (in his final project for another class no less) wrote a reflection on his freshman year and decided that he was really unimpressed with most of his freshmen teachers this year because he really didn't learn anything. Too bad that on an open book test he made a 69. Guess he's right. He didn't learn much. Maybe if he'd tried......

In other freshmen musings, I overheard the following comments made by freshmen during our discussion of Romeo & Juliet, our last unit of the year:

1. A little context - Romeo & Juliet takes place over the course of 6 days; they meet, fall in love, marry and die for each other in 6 days. Upon explaining the timeline to students, one student raised his hand and said "Wow. Six days? They must have had longer days back then."

2. If you remember, Juliet is following Friar Lawrence's plan to play dead until Romeo comes back. A messenger was sent to Romeo who had been banished to another town. The messenger was to tell Romeo that Juliet is not really dead. Alas, Romeo never gets the message and comes to her tomb and kills himself. Of course, as he is talking about killing himself, Juliet begins to stir. All of the kids always yell out "She's awake! She's awake!" and things like that. During one viewing of the movie, a kid yells out something like that and another responds with "Why doesn't he check her pulse!" To which another responds with "What?!? They didn't have pulses back then!"

I thought a few things when I heard this -
- She's lying in a tomb. Who would question that?
- I wasn't aware that pulses in a living body were recent discoveries.
- I have got to write this down!

3. And of course one student pointed out the painfully obvious - "If they'd had cell phones back then, none of this would have happened." Something tells me that Shakespeare's point wasn't to point out to a bunch of freshmen the advances in technologies and communications over the years.