What we think of during the state-mandated Moment of Silence

After a lawsuit and appropriate debate, Illinois' mandated moment of silence is back in force. For about ten seconds every morning, students are to sit down, shut up and reflect on something.

This was its first week in effect, so we did some investigatory work to see what kids today are reflecting on.

• "I reflect on what to reflect about."
  --Mark Edelson, sophomore



• "I do my math homework."
  Paula Cyzon, senior



• "I give thanks to the Lord Jesus Christ for the day of learning ahead of me in your class."
  Becky Pritchards, junior



• "It'd be insulting to you if I thought I had to tell you exactly how much money I won last night playing cards. And by the way, I won a lot!"
  Benjamin Hough, sophomore



• "Is this something that's going to be on my college entrance materials? No? Then, I usually think of girls."
  Any Honest Male

Former-Student-Turned-Marine Inspiration

Today, an old student of mine who'd served in the Marines after graduation came back to school for a presentation on American veterans. He’d served his country in Operation Iraqi Freedom, undergone training and come back alive to tell his story and keep a national perspective in mind for the younger generation. After the presentation, he shook my hand, said he was doing good and offered to tell me more about his experiences.

I wanted to tell him how proud I was about how far he’d come, about how hard he’d worked, and about how well he’d conducted himself in what must have been a beyond-harrowing experience. I wanted to tell him he did his high school, and his country proud.

Instead, I said, “Joe, you’re doing well, not good. Your grammar sucks.” And I wrote him up and kicked him out of the building.


"Yeah, you're a hero. Now sit up straight."

Practical Haikus using the Nazis to Describe Your High School

Last fall, I attended a poetry slam, where one of my seniors wrote a poem about her school day. One line that stuck with me: “This place is like a concentration camp.”

What a brilliant comparison. Incisive, historically contextual, revelatory. However, I figured she might need a little guidance if she’s truly found her vocation of Full-Throated Poet for a Generation, so I wrote her some verses designed to show how it’s really done.

My high school is a
school, a place where I learn skills.
Just like the Nazis did.

Oh man. This class sucks.
We have homework? Hey, teacher?
Hitler gave homework.

I just studied the
history of Auschwitz, and
I got déjà-vu.

School is so tragic,
The death, the pain and suffering.
The Holocaust, too.

I hope she appreciates this. She hasn't even thanked me yet.

A sad, miserable student. Comparisons between 

her situation and Auschwitz are inevitable.

A Student's Introduction to William Shakespeare, by William Shakespeare

Greetings, 21st Century high school students. As I write this, I can’t help but notice that I’ve been dead for almost four hundred years now, and the planet is a decidedly different place. In my day, I was lucky if I didn’t get a bucket of offal thrown on my head when walking the city streets, and now, apparently, the real danger is carbon emissions and too much food. My my, we have wasted time and now time doth waste us.

As I look over this brave new world of modern medicine and McDonalds you all have managed to cook up, I can’t help but think, Hoo boy, you people really made a dog’s breakfast of art, didn’t you?

For starters, in my day, the theatre was a place where the struggles of humanity were replayed and put on display for all to enjoy. Now, you apparently have something called Reality Television, where people stumble between bars, bump uglies and talk about themselves in the third person. No catharsis. No resolution. No wars or even mistaken identities and twins separated at birth. What kind of amateurs do you have putting this crap on? (By the way, do you know if they need writers for that job? They do? Okay, can you give me the address?)

Which reminds me, what’s this reputation I’ve managed to garner with every single high schooler in the building? I’m boring? I’m hard to understand? Give me a break—back in Elizabethan and Jacobean England, I regularly sold out every seat in the house. Did you see my Winter’s Tale? I mean, I had a bear come out in Act IV and eat a guy. A fucking bear! What, you want the bear to transform into a vampire and ride a motorbike into a burning building or something? You do? Well, I’ll get back to you.

(No I won’t, actually. Please. You know how hard it is to get a guy in a bear costume to look frightening? And we didn’t even have Marlon Brando back then.)

I tried to soften up the first class I sat in on this morning. I tried to tell them not to transform the pillars of the world into a strumpet, but all I got was, “Oh, so you’re the berk who wrote all that ‘To be or not to be’ rot?” and then Bam! I’m getting my arm twisted behind my back and made to say things like “I’m a big fat stupidhead” and “I liketh to kisseth guyseth.” And I thought I was lowering myself when I made the Porter a drunk.

Look, I’ll admit—my language is elevated. But I was trying to combine poetry with drama, and in all modesty, I think I pulled it off pretty well. Try looking at it this way—you don’t have to “get” every single line I wrote in order to follow my plays. Hell, I don’t get it all the time. When I wrote Hamlet, I made him in his early twenties, but then that windbag Richard Burbage just had to play him, so suddenly he’s a middle-aged overweight has-been, which so completely screwed up the play’s continuity, I don’t even want to talk about it. But that’s not even the point. The point is, when a character jumps out and says, “Lay on, Macduff!” or “The play’s the thing!” or “What fools these mortals be,” he’s not saying something you can’t get. You might just have to think about it for a minute.

In fact, try right now, with the “What fools these mortals be” line. What does Puck really mean?

• Mortal people are idiots
• Idiots are mortal people
• People idiots mortal are
• “Do we have to bring our book today?”

Okay, never mind. I guess I’m saying that, the fact that I’m writing verse drama just means I think highly enough of you to be able to follow it. If your brains have been turned slowly into tapioca mush from watching and reading the stuff I’ve chanced upon since I came back to life, yeah, it’s going to hurt a little. No fooling. So does going to the gym when you’ve been moldering on a couch over a long, inert weekend. But “challenging” doesn’t mean “I’m dumb if I don’t get it.” Get it?

Which reminds me—whoever said I was an elitist artist? Elitist? Me? Are you kidding? Half my audience was wasted on beer made from sawdust, for Christ’s sake. You know how many fart jokes I had to throw into Comedy of Errors before the Neanderthals I worked with would put it on? You know what “poprin pear” in Romeo and Juliet really means? Or “thereby hangs a tail” in Othello? You want to really get under your teacher’s skin, find the double entendres. At least then he’ll know you’re reading the play and not just using it as a pillow.

Well, I digress—I have a callback for a soup commercial and I need to rehearse my lines. So, in closing, I can’t promise you’ll love everything I wrote, but give it a go, will you? You give it some time, you might surprise yourself.

But I do apologize for Kenneth Branagh. I promise, I’ll have a word with him as soon as he’s done mucking up my work in his latest film.

Forsooth,

POSTSCRIPT: Famous Plays by Shakespeare

• Macbeth
• Twelfth Night
• Twelfth Night Part II: The Morning After
• MacBird
• Gremlins 3: Scaly Little Things
• MacBush
• I Do Not Like Green Eggs and Hamlet
• Dude, Where’s My Friends, Romans, Countrymen?
• MacBlago
• The Hairy Wives of Windsor
• MacPoliticianIDon’tLike