Three Stories: A Review

"Stone Soup: A Classroom Parable"

Okay, at first my viewpoint on this story was poisoned by my kindergarten understanding of the children's book, "Stone Soup," which, as far as I could discern when I was a wittle boy, was about delicious-looking soup, and how hungry I was, and how much I wished we were having soup for lunch that day, and how sad I was when I found out that it was chicken nuggets again, and how much I liked Super Mario Bros., and how that girl is pretty and I want to push her in the mud to let her know.

As I read it, though, the true moral seemed pretty blunt-force-trauma-to-the-melon straightforward.  Be adaptable.  Don't be afraid of the new and strange.  If you're a teacher, you're going to need to change, and change often.

All things I have learned the hard way in the past three years.  Still, good to see them in parable form.

"The B.O.O.K."

There once was a time when books probably freaked people the hell out.  Especially in those devil-may-care illiterate Dark Ages (and Middle Ages, and other Ages).  I'm sure the old-timers were pissed about "ye devyce moste cruele, waerdes within for fooles."  I'm sure there were some staunch chisel-and-cave-wall hipsters who insisted that they liked the smell of limestone, and you just don't get that from these soulless books, and all that.

I'm willing to bet someone held on to all their old slabs, grumbling about how reading "Cave Wall Love Anthem" on paper just isn't the same as good old granite.

"Pencils Across the Curriculum"

Now this one, I couldn't really identify with.  I remember only having one computer in my classroom, back in 1995.  It was a green-screen Mac with Oregon Trail, and that's as far as I remember.  Some nicer computers were available in the lab, and they could run sweet, sweet Hyperstudio, but we never did much with them.  Our teacher was old-school...like, "write this sentence fifty times because you did a naughty" old school.

Thirteen years later, once I started teaching, computers were herpes and classrooms were the entire population of coastal Mexico in mid-March.  There are laptop carts, computer labs (which themselves are slowly going the way of the dodo), iPads, and more.  We still aren't quite to the 1:1 computer utopia that I'm sure we are headed towards, but we are steaming ahead.

So yeah, I didn't really identify with the story about the single pencil.  I understood the point (HAHAHAHAHAHAHAAAAAAAAPUN!), but it didn't make much sense to me.

I guess I can just......erase....it...from my....memory?  No?  Two pencil puns is too much?