My students learned the word "anecdote" this week. This blog entry is going to be anecdotal. Way to put your vocabulary words into practice, Ms. Griner!
So we (my senior class and I) read "To the Virgins, to Make Much of Time" this week and as I learned from the anecdote (#2!) in the margin of the good ole Arkansas Teachers Edition of the textbook, the clock as we know it today was invented around the time this poem was written. Hence the references to making the most of our "time" and "Old Time flying" all over the poem. If you'd never been really aware of what time of day it was based on anything more than the angle of the sun in the sky (which you couldn't calculate if you weren't rich enough to have taken math), and all of a sudden clocks were tick-tock-ing all over the place everywhere you turned, I can understand a little bit of obsession with it slipping away.
I digress. So the kids were working in groups going through questions about the poem and the last one asked them to guess, based on the content of the poem, what might have been invented around this time. One of the most entertaining students in the class, we'll call him Elvin, had the most brilliant guess. "Ms. Griner, I was wondering if since the poem is about needing to get married quickly, if maybe the invention was the discotheque." Well, Elvin, since my grades have to be based on accuracy and facts and not my own personal entertainment, I can't give you the bonus points for this one. But oh, how I wish I could, because sometimes my personal entertainment is quite valuable...
I must also thank this student for providing me the opportunity to relate the first amusing classroom anecdote (#3! Yes!) on my blog.
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