A busy day of smoking meat (ribs, loins, and chicken) and completing outstanding yard work (hedge-trimming, mowing) leaves me tired — too tired to do more than this…
general
Missed
They missed it, that little detail, but we had fun acting out their interpretations.
That One Detail
They always miss it — that one detail that changes everything about the ending of To Kill a Mockingbird. It’s so small, yet it tells us so much, and it’s a sign of how good an author Harper Lee was. She sets up the situation with a misdirection:
“Mr. Finch.” Mr. Tate was still planted to the floorboards. “Bob Ewell fell on his knife. I can prove it.”
Atticus wheeled around. His hands dug into his pockets. “Heck, can’t you even try to see it my way? You’ve got children of your own, but I’m older than you. When mine are grown I’ll be an old man if I’m still around, but right now I’m—if they don’t trust me they won’t trust anybody. Jem and Scout know what happened. If they hear of me saying downtown something different happened—Heck, I won’t have them any more. I can’t live one way in town and another way in my home.”
Mr. Tate rocked on his heels and said patiently, “He’d flung Jem down, he stumbled over a root under that tree and—look, I can show you.”
Mr. Tate reached in his side pocket and withdrew a long switchblade knife.
We assume that Tate is going to show Atticus how Bob Ewell fell on his knife, and he does just that.
Mr. Tate flicked open the knife. “It was like this,” he said. He held the knife and pretended to stumble; as he leaned forward his left arm went down in front of him. “See there? Stabbed himself through that soft stuff between his ribs. His whole weight drove it in.”
Mr. Tate closed the knife and jammed it back in his pocket. “Scout is eight years old,” he said. “She was too scared to know exactly what went on.”
But that’s not the reason Lee includes that detail. The real reason comes into focus a few paragraphs later:
“Heck,” said Atticus abruptly, “that was a switchblade you were waving. Where’d you get it?”
“Took it off a drunk man,” Mr. Tate answered coolly.
I was trying to remember. Mr. Ewell was on me… then he went down… Jem must have gotten up. At least I thought…
“Heck?”
“I said I took it off a drunk man downtown tonight. Ewell probably found that kitchen knife in the dump somewhere. Honed it down and bided his time… just bided his time.”
The kids were working on it today, and I pointed out that there’s a detail that makes everything different, changes the whole story. “No one has ever managed to see it,” I challenged them, and it’s true: most kids read right over that detail:
“Heck,” said Atticus abruptly, “that was a switchblade you were waving. Where’d you get it?”
“Took it off a drunk man,” Mr. Tate answered coolly.
The drunk man he took it off was Bob Ewell. When Tate arrives to investigate the body, he finds Bob Ewell lying on the ground, a knife in his craw, as he puts it, and a switchblade in his hand. In order to cover up Boo Radley’s involvement, he has to take the switchblade. He tampers with evidence to protect Boo Radley.
Today, though, one girl almost got it. “Mr. Scott, I think it’s something to do with this knife,” she said. She’d read the passage and knew something felt off. What felt off? It’s a detail that doesn’t seem to be connected to anything, and Lee brings it up twice, which means it must be important. I just smiled in response. “Could be something important.”
Later in the day, a couple of hours after class in fact, she emailed me:
I think that the switchblade was Bob Ewells and Heck heard the kids getting attacked and came to the scene and took the switchblade from Bob then Boo Radley, who can see very well in the dark, used a kitchen knife to kill Bob Ewell, making it look like Bob tripped and his death was an accident.
I’m not completely sure if this is right but I have a feeling it is.
“So close,” I replied.
We’ll see tomorrow if she got it.
Passover
The story of Passover always confused me. The Israelite god is going to destroy all the firstborn of Egypt in order to convince Pharaoh to let the slaves go (after, according to the passage, this same god “hardened Pharaoh’s heart” against the idea of releasing his slaves). He commands the Israelites to smear blood above their door in order to receive protection and save their own firstborn. Why in the world did an all-powerful, all-knowing god need the Israelites to smear blood on their door lintel in order to indicate to this god that the occupants were, in fact, Israelites? This so anthropomorphizes this god as to make it laughable. It leaves readers imagining this god moving physically from house to house, door to door, checking to see if there’s blood, then acting accordingly. Now, granted, I believe the text refers to an angel doing the actual killing, but spirit is spirit, right (in whatever sense “disembodied mind that has the ability to affect the physical world” might mean)?
Yet there’s a more brutal way of expressing this confusion:
Observing and Inferring
Shooting in the Backyard
The Boy wanted to have a Nerf war. “But I only have 4 bullets,” he admitted as we were getting ready.
“Kind of hard to have a real war with only 4 bullets,” I suggested. “Perhaps a duel would be better?”
In the end, we just got the trusty bb gun out and shot at some cans in the backyard.
We tried to stay outside as much as possible today — it’s finally warm…
Soccer and the Yard
E had two games today to make up for the game that got rained out some time ago. They won the second game 3-1, but the first game was tough: a 1-4 loss.
In the second half, E played goalie. It was 1-2 when the half started. On the opponents’ first possession, they scored.
I knew it would be tough on the Boy — he doesn’t like letting people down, whether or not that’s what actually happened. They scored one more on the Boy. I had the camera up, hoping to get a good action shot of E stopping the ball.
Not quite.
“I’m never playing goalie again,” he declared.
Attorney’s Visit, Tournament Start, and Mexican Dinner
Reading Selections
What in the middle-school canon might be the perfectly apt reading selections in April 2022? We’re about to begin Diary of Anne Frank in one class and Lord of the Flies in another.
Who would have thought that the barbarity of World War Two would return? Didn’t we all think we, as cultures, as a species, had finally outgrown this? But we haven’t. Why? Because we all have the beast in us?
More Testing
“Isn’t that test in a couple of weeks the state test?” Mrs. G asked this morning.
“No, no,” clarified Mrs. H. “In a couple of weeks it’s the state pilot TDA test. The actual state test won’t be until May.”
“Remember Mrs. J was telling us about the test the state is making our school take and how Mr. F[, the school principal,] was trying to convince the district to count the state test in lieu of the second [district-mandated] test?”
“Oh, yes, I remember that.” The discussion continued along the lines of how frustrating it is to be testing so much but how we can get our kids more prepared for these district- and state-mandated tests.
That three English teachers were having trouble figuring out just how many major, schedule-impacting writing tests there were to be this year says a lot about the testing load the district and state put on teachers and students.
Our district mandates quarterly benchmark tests in English and math through the third quarter, and each of these impact the schedule and learning environment in a major way. Plus, the district requires us to give two major writing tests in preparation for the state writing test. Each of these take half the school day. So that’s eight days of testing right there — testing days that affect all classes and shorten all periods by approximately half. Naturally, it’s hard to get kids to engage in meaningful learning when they’ve just spent two hours analyzing some awful short story that’s at least 70 years old because the testing companies want to save money (i.e., boost revenue) by using texts that are in the public domain and hence don’t require licensing fees. (We English teachers hear all the time about how important it is to choose texts about things young readers can relate to, and the the state farms out its test development to a company that completely disregards that.) So the day is in essence a wash. Eight days down the drain — almost two full school weeks.
And that’s just what the district mandates.
It’s bad enough that the district puts middle and high school students through this; it’s also rammed through the elementary schools. The Boy had his district-mandated third-quarter math benchmark test today. It was almost sixty questions. For a fourth grader.
I’ve been saying that eventually, the US has to realize this obsession with testing is doing nothing but harm to our students, and the powers that be eventually have to change this, but I’ve been saying it for nearly twenty years now, and instead of getting better, it’s getting worse.
What’s worse is, I don’t know of a single teacher that takes these benchmarks all that seriously. “They’re designed to show for which topics students need remediation,” the six-figure-salaried district big-shots explain to us. If as a teacher who’s now spent nearly 150 days working with these kids I can’t tell you off the top of my head who needs remediation with what topic, I probably am not putting enough thought into my teaching.
What’s frustrating is, I don’t know of a single classroom teacher that had any input into the discussion about whether these obsessive, intrusive tests would have any value to the teacher at all. These decisions were made by individuals making two to three times what teachers make while spending absolutely no time in the classroom. They haven’t been in a classroom for over a decade at best, I’d venture.
I sometimes wonder what would happen if a whole school — everyone from administrators on down — simply refused to spend the time administering these tests. Everyone. Simple refusal. “We’ve decided as a school that this is not the best way to spend our students’ time.” What if some schools did it? What if all schools did it? What if teachers were vocal about their opposition to all this testing (well, they are, to be honest)?
I imagine what I’d do if I were a student. All the students of course hate these tests. They’re completely meaningless to them. I think I’d be tempted just to choose random answers and apologize to my teacher if it ended up making him look bad in the eyes of the powers that be.
Random Pictures from the Walk I Took during the Boy's Soccer Practice
