My son was in second grade this year. Every day, on the way home from the bus stop, I’d ask what he did that day, and invariably they did nothing. I’d prod, as directed by the school: “Which specials did you have today? Did you go to the library? Did you have gym? What did you get in trouble for? Did anyone fall out of a chair?” and basically get nothing.
Now the school year’s winding down, which means that the other day he came home with pounds of classwork–much of it unfinished, or even untouched (kinda confirming his claim that he does nothing at school). But in among the mess of nightmare penmanship and abandoned math sheets were bizarre gems, like these little daily writing things. I don’t even know what these were supposed to be: They are half-sheet size, stapled into booklets, rarely dated. Sometimes they are just a sentence or two about his weekend or favorite food, but often they are these weird schematic jokes:
Or little nuggets that read like spitball pitches for indie horror films. Here’s my favorite:
That says (with spelling corrected): AN UNFORTUNATE HAMSTER AND A MONKEY WITH BIG EARS TIED TOGETHER TO A BONE.
Jesus! Did they film these! Is this from the TV Guide in a parallel universe were Begotten won an Academy Award?
Also, apparently, he and his classmates made an anthology:
This thing weighs over a pound-and-a-half and is thicker than my thumb. My boy’s contribution is the first chapter (?!) of a piece of some sort of Snoopy/Pikachu slash fic. Wolves bring them magical weapons and some sort of sonorous bird. There were more chapters of this–occasionally illustrated, invariably scrawled edge-to-edge, front and back, on loose sheets of college-rule paper–embedded in the trash-monster that came home in his backpack. There was also an unpublished draft for the first book in his series Presidents in Peril in which Lincoln is saved from wolf-assassination by a time-traveling ninja (also an excellent film pitch, in my humble).
Oh, and, one more thing: They made a whale. A 1:1 scale replica of a blue whale, made from black plastic tarps and inflated with industrial blowers (the kind the custodians use to dry the floor after waxing).
(Sorry these pics aren’t super-fantastico; there was no practical way to get a pic of the outside of the thing, because it was as big as a fucking blue whale.)
A whale. A whale. They made a whale, and then inflated it, and got inside it as a class, and made measurements so they could tape down 3×5 index cards labeling the locations at all the organs.
They worked on it for months–during which, every day, I asked my kid: “What did you do at school today?” and he answered “Nothing.”
HE SPENT HIS DAYS TOILING IN THE BELLY OF A WHALE, and that was “Nothing” to him; Nothing at all.
We truly live in an age of wonders.
These are our tax dollars at work, Ann Arbor, Michigan. This is what we vote for when we vote for millages. I, for one, have no regrets. None at all.
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