Thursday, April 07, 2005

 

Andy Kaufman's Not Dead! It's Just Part of His Act

Today was one of those good days. It was a full day of work, and even though it was a day before a three day weekend, the kids weren't too antsy. At least not in any way that I wasn't able to difficult to handle. I was subbing the same place I did yesterday, for a teacher that left part way through the day, who is apparently going to be out a few more days. I don't know what's up and I'd rather not know as the students are all asking. If it's something I'm not supposed to tell them (which it seems like) it's better that I don't know.

So I started off with 9th grade English. They had just taken a test on George Orwell's Animal Farm yesterday, so today we watched a movie based on the book. We got to see the best production of Animal Farm that I've ever seen, the Hallmark/Turner production from a few years back with Peter Ustinov as "Old Major," Kelsey Grammer as "Snowball" and Julia Ormond as the dog who's name escapes me for the moment. OK, only getting to see the first half of it and having to watch it 4 times was a little annoying, but I've spent my day worse ways before.

During Study Hall in 4th period I received a lesson plan from the missing teacher. The great thing about that is that it was everything I was already doing or had planned to do. Additionally, the things she asked me to do extra I had already done. Good lord, have I actually turned into a teacher? Anyway, it's validating to know that my instincts were right on everything.

One thing that constantly amazes me having taught grades 6 - 12 in the last couple months is the maturity differences between grades. The difference between a sixth and seventh grader, for example, is absolutley huge. The differences are smaller as the kids get older, but they're still there. I prefer the more mature kids, I have a harder time with the younger ones, not that I don't enjoy younger kids, but I feel more comfortable the more mature the kids are. So the day started with 9th graders, not bad, but there's still some middle school immaturity in them at that age. Nothing I can't handle. One of the kids I get along with best at the high school is a ninth grader, primarily because we had a long and meaningful discussion about the films of Kevin Smith. He calls me Dante. People who know me will find that hilarious.

So after beginning the day with ninth graders I got to finish with a 10th grade honors English class. OK, so not only are they a year older, they're more serious students and have a little more going on intellectually. It's a group I could relate to a little more. In that class they were doing on final student's demonstrative speech (graded by another teacher, thanks to the state who decided that a certified teacher needed to grade such a thing) and taking a vocabulary quiz. While I'm reading off the words I mentioned something about a first season Simpson's episode. That spun off into Itchy & Scratchy which we all agreed that we would watch if it were a real cartoon. I mentioned that The Roadrunner really was every bit as violent as I & S just minus the squirting guts. That spun off into Andy Kaufman and his alter ego Tony Clifton. After settling down on the extraneous comments and finishing up the quiz, we had cupcakes. There was a reason for the cupcakes but it's sort of involved, so I'll just say that I enjoyed my cupcake.

The bell rang, everyone left except for one extremely shy girl who hadn't said much during our previous discussions except to come up with the name of Tony Clifton when nobody else could. She asked me if I knew that Bob Zmuda occasionally played Tony Clifton to further screw with Andy Kaufman's audience. I did know that, having seen Tony and Andy together on TV once. This girl and I proceeded to have this animated discussion about Kaufman's career. She was a huge Kaufman fan and talked about all of his odd antics with a real excitement. We had a really nice talk, I told her how a lot of the stuff from "Man on the Moon" played out in real life as I was about her age when most of the stuff portrayed in that movie actually happened.

I had a good day at work, the choices I'd made on what to do with the kids were validated by their teacher, the ninth graders gave me little trouble, even study hall was pretty mellow. When I get to spend the last hour of my day at work talking about cartoons and Andy Kaufman with a group of intelligent 10th graders, well, I'm pretty happy. Then again, it doesn't take much to make me happy.

BOJ

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