School Shooting dialogue

First Piece
Professor
Sarah, student
Shooter
Student 1
Student 2

Professor: Let’s open our books to page 413. I assume you all have read the assigned pages.
Sarah: (raises her hand) Professor, I read the pages, but I really didn’t understand the second poem by E. E. Cummings. Who is “anyone, someone, and noone?” It just doesn’t make sense.
[A man peeks in the door then closes it again.]
Professor: (pauses)…Guess he didn’t want to answer that question for you.
[The class snickers a little.]
Professor: (continues) Well did you read it slowly and out loud?
Sarah: Yes…
Professor: And how many times?
Sarah: Well, a few times, I guess.
Professor: That’s your problem, how many times did I tell you that you should read it to try to understand it?
Sarah: More than…
[The man bursts the door open.]
Student 1: Oh my God! He has a gun!
[Shot.]
Student 2: (Gasps, and falls on the floor. In a whisper,) Get down, he shot me. Act dead.
[Shots continue. All students get under desks]
Sarah: (In a whisper to herself) God, help us! Please! Save us! Oh no! The professor! No, not me, not me!
[Shot.]


Second Piece
Professor
Sarah, student
Shooter
Student 1
Student 2

Professor: Let’s open our books to page 413. I assume you all have read the assigned pages.
Sarah: (raises her hand) Professor, I read the pages, but I really didn’t understand the second poem by E. E. Cummings. Who is “anyone, someone, and noone?” It just doesn’t make sense.
[A man peeks in the door then closes it again.]
Professor: (pauses)…Guess he didn’t want to answer that question for you.
[The class snickers a little. Suspicious, Sarah grabs her phone and puts it on emergency mode, holding it under her desk.]
Professor: (continues) Well did you read it slowly and out loud?
Sarah: Yes…
Professor: And how many times?
Sarah: Well, a few times, I guess.
Professor: That’s your problem, how many times did I tell you that you should read it to try to understand it?
Sarah: More than…
[The man bursts the door open. Sarah presses “talk” on her cell phone, calling 911]
Student 1: Oh my God! He has a gun!
[Shot.]
Student 2: (Gasps, and falls on the floor. In a whisper,) Get down, he shot me. Act dead.
[Shots continue. All students get under desks]
Sarah: God, please help us! [Gets up and in one motion sprays shooter in the face.] Get his gun! Shoot him in the leg! I already called the police, they had to have heard everything!

Spoon River, Amanda Barker

Amanda Barker

HENRY got me with child,
Knowing that I could not bring forth life
Without losing my own.
In my youth therefore I entered the portals of dust.
Traveler, it is believed in the village where I lived
That Henry loved me with a husband’s love,
But I proclaim from the dust
That he slew me to gratify his hatred.

Iva Goodhart

Amanda Kom
Dr. Hepworth
ENGL 150
3 April 2007

Iva Goodhart

I was a student who loved to learn
A girlfriend who loved to love
A friend who loved secrets and giggles
A daughter who loved to please
A traveler who saw the world

I just wanted to make the world good and safe
I wanted crime to stop
Hunger to vanish
World peace.

They put away a nice man
Whose finger prints were on my books
After a night of studying
In the Lewis Clark State College Library
But he just helped me up after falling down the stairs
And helped me pick up my books
I was tired and my shoe was untied.
It wasn’t until later that night
That I was murdered.

It was my boyfriend’s X-girlfriend.
She was waiting by my new car
Jealous of my life and the car he bought me.
She hadn’t slept in days,
Eyes red with hate
It was she that killed me
And covered it up.

Ima Be'Atch

I ith from Thweden.
I wath in Pataha with my Catth and very lathy fisch
He thleepth and thleepth and thleepth
I wath almotht dead, I knew it.
Cuth I wath 94 yearth old
Then my catth dethided to out me
With thirty-two thets of clawth.

Iva Goodhart

I was a student who loved to learn
A girlfriend who loved to love
A friend who loved secrets and giggles
A daughter who loved to please
A traveler who saw the world

I just wanted to make the world good and safe
I wanted crime to stop
Hunger to vanish
World peace.

They put away a nice man
Whose finger prints were on my books
After a night of studying
In the Lewis Clark State College Library
But he just helped me up after falling down the stairs
And helped me pick up my books
I was tired and my shoe was untied.
It wasn’t until later that night
That I was murdered.

It was my boyfriend’s X-girlfriend.
She was waiting by my new car
Jealous of my life and the car he bought me.
She hadn’t slept in days,
Eyes red with hate
It was she that killed me
And covered it up.

Summary and Paraphrase of Saenz’s “To the Desert”

Summary:
A narrator who knows the desert explains his relationship with the land.

Paraphrase:
The narrator went to the desert one night in August where he learned how to live without rain. He says that the desert represents his thirst. All he knows is the desert. He explains what the desert is made up of; “sand, wind, sun,” and the blue “burning sky.” The wind blows hot pieces of sand that burn the skin. Saenz claims that the desert makes him a new man. The desert’s reputation of being warm holds true as it keeps him warm. He loves the desert so much that he says he was made for it. Being in the desert, he is above, below and surrounded by the desert. He wakes to the desert. He never wants it to change, to break what love he has for it. He tells the desert to “reach, rise, [and] blow.” He then asks God to save him, to take him and his land.

The Bee is not afraid of me

The Bee is not afraid of me.
I know the Butterfly.
The pretty people in the Woods
Receive me cordially

The Brooks laugh louder when I come
The Breezes madder play;
Wherefore mine eye thy silver mists,
Wherefore, Oh Summer's Day?

-Emily Dickinson

I think in the fourth grade we had to make posters with a picture of a poem that we had to memorize and recite for the class. This is the poem I chose and I don't think I will ever forget the poem. It's beautiful :D

Kennedy

So this is a little late, but better now than never, huh?
#1 page 250

The question asked if I had ever been in physical danger? I don’t recall any specific time when I felt that I was in serious danger, but I felt something similar when my friend was in danger. While I was in Germany, my best friend Mariana (another exchange student) went secretly to London. She had a friend in Frankfurt, a couple hours on the train from our city. She told our host parents she was living there, but really, she had bought a plane ticket to London and flew by herself to a city she didn’t even know any one in. She was there for about 4 days. A few times, her cell phone died and we couldn’t get a hold of her, and other times, she wouldn’t call me or my other exchange friend that was living in the same city as I did. She ended up making it there and back okay, and our host parents never found out, but it was really scary for us. One week later, on the radio, we heard about the subway bombing in London. Had she been there one week later, she could have been hurt there or even killed and only one other girl than myself knew she was even there.

I couldn’t read much deeper into Robert Frost’s “Out, Out-“ or Theodore Roethke’s “My Papa’s Waltz” than the sawing off the hand and being whipped at a boy. It was too sad! I hated how Roethke made his drunken dad metaphorically seem like a ballroom dance. A Waltz is upbeat and happy, a three beat song where the dancers step down on the first beat and get up on their toes for the second and third. Being beaten should be more like a Rammstein song where there’s screaming and anything resembling dancing is thrashing. I wasn’t a fan of Roetke’s poem.

I loved Saenz’s “To the Desert.” I first thought it was about love, about passion, but the first question about the poem asked, “how does the speaker feel about the land being described?” Then in the last part of the poem it says “save me, my God, take me, my land. Save me, take me.” So then it sounds like a prayer. I think that the poem IS a prayer to God. The entire poem sounds like a contemporary song we’d sing at my church. Especially the line that says “…then bend/ Your force, to break, to blow, burn, and make me new.”

Piano

Piano by D.H. Lawrence

The music takes over a man as it makes him think of a simpler time, his childhood.

In the evening, hearing a woman singing to a piano makes the narrator think of a child sitting under the piano at the mothers feet as she plays piano and sings. He returns to the present time then, again, remembers the child, himself on winter Sunday nights singing hymns accompanied by a piano. The singer in present time gets a little louder and he returns to reality and upon reminiscing on his childhood, he becomes sad wanting the past.

Colonel Satoris

Did anyone else notice that William Faulkner used the name "Colonel Satoris" in both of his stories that we read in class. In "A Rose for Emily" you can find it on page 31 and in "Barn Burning" you can find it on page 31. Just a little something I noticed.

Love Poem Over Toast Paraphrase

We do a lot of things intentionally to start our days. We start the day with a routine, get up, drink coffee, get in the car and go. And then we go through our days preventing things, whatever the media tells us we need to prevent like aging skin. We are materialistic and we like our things to be nice (keep the hoe from rusting), and we like to let everyone know that our lives are perfect, and hate the think that anyone would know any different. We say yes and no throughout the day as each day is like every other day. We spend our days, our lives, wanting instead of appreciating what we have, what we’re doing, and living in the moment. Since all we do is want, we want each other so at the end, we don’t want to leave each other, but we want to love more and more real than we do. We look at each other and pretend that we love each other as we want to.

Love Poem over Toast

So I had two different summaries of the poem, Love Poem over Toast. The first was:

A husband and wife sit at breakfast thinking of their monotonous lives. They think of the end instead of the present.

And the second was:

Two lovers sit at breakfast looking at eachother knowing the affair is over. They know the "love" is just physical attraction instead of soul and mind.

Stock Western Characters

The Stock Western Characters

Cowboy hero
Greasy villian and his bandits
Corrupt Sheriff
Helpful priest
Beautiful lady- always attracted by or to the cowboy hero
Faithful horse
Sometimes the sidekick

Plato's Cave People vs Robert

Plato tells about people seeing things on the wall but not in real life. The blind man can't see anything except through words and feeling. Neither the people in the cave nor the blind man saw everything as it was. As the people walking by showed the people shapes through shadows, the husband showed the blind man through drawing the cathedral. The people were stuck against/ toward the wall as Robert was stuck being blind.

The Chronological Happenings of Miss Emily

Miss Emily lived with her dad and her hired hand. She gave piano lessons and painted. Her dad had lent money to the city and because he did, they didn't make him or Miss Emily pay taxes. Her dad died and Miss Emily refused to believe he was dead. She let anyone touch his body until 3 days after he died. After she died, she stayed in her house with the hired hand. Next time she was seen, she had cut her hair and was with Homer Barron, a Yankee. Emily's cousins came to stay wth Miss Emily and Homer disappeared. She kicked them out and he returned Everyone thought they were married by how she started to act. She bought rat poison and then Homer disappeared again. She closed all of her windows and shut up the house upstairs. The house started to stink and so some locals put some lysol into a window. She wasn't seen much after that. When she died, the help let people in and they found her downstairs. They went upstairs and found the remains of Homer Barron on a bed with everything set out as if a wedding had just occured. On the pillow next to him was a grey hair and a pillow that was dented in as if a head had just been laying there.

Point of View

Amanda Kom
Dr. Hepworth
ENGL 150-03 Introduction to Literature
29 January 2007
Alternative Points of View
(Third person point of view for John Updike’s “A & P”- a non participant point of view)
As Sammy stood in a slouched stance ringing in his customer’s groceries, three young and nearly naked girls walked into the store. Sammy didn’t notice until he held the HiHo crackers. But when he noticed, he froze and stared at the girls in only their bathing suits. He instantly memorized ever curve and freckle on each girl and took extra notice of the girl in a beige bathing suit that led her two friends.
The old lady that was waiting for her groceries to be checked grunted to get Sammy’s attention. Sammy instantly snapped back into reality and checked the crackers a second time. The lady snapped, “You already rang those up, are you trying to charge a poor old woman more than she already has to pay? Back in my day…”
(First person point of view for William Faulkner’s “A Rose For Emily”- an observer)
I watched all of the other town’s women in their tight, short, black dresses as we all stood over Miss Emily Grierson’s grave. They didn’t even care that she had died, they were only curious and wanted to see all of the latest news firsthand so they’d have something to gossip about later.
Most of us used to take care, in a way, of Miss Emily before she cut herself off completely. She was very stubborn and we couldn’t do anything directly for her. We left her alone and the city didn’t make her pay taxes, but I heard that caused some disagreement with the newer tax collectors. I don’t think she ever knew the kinds of sacrifices people made for her.
(Third person point of view from Eudora Welty’s “Why I live at the P.O.”- nonparticipant)
Stella-Rondo moved back to her parents house after she and her husband, Mr. Whitaker, separated. Hurt but prideful, she told her family her biased side of the story, so everyone, Mama, Papa-Daddy, and Uncle Rondo, pitied her. Everyone but her sister, who was older by one year and one day. She saw right through Stella-Rondo and despised her for being the spoiled baby of the family.
Stella-Rondo didn’t come back home by herself, but with a two year old child that she had named Shirley-T. She swore she was adopted, but she resembled Stella-Rondo and Mr. Whitaker to a tee. To keep negative attention off of herself, she framed her sister almost immediately and tried her hardest to make the family mad at her.

Amanda Kom
ENGL 150-03
January 23, 2007
The Foolish Hyena
One day somewhere in Africa, a Hyena passed by a working Meerkat.
“What are you doing?” The Hyena asked.
The Meerkat replied, “Working.”
“Why work?” The Hyena scoffed. “The sun is bright and the season is young! Play! Play in the sun!”
“If I play, then nothing will be ready when the rainy season comes! While you are out in the wet weather, I will be having my own fun and I won’t be miserable. You will see.”
The Hyena rolled on his back laughing at what he just heard. He ignored the Meerkat’s warning and continued playing in the bright African sun. He chased butterflies, teased hedgehogs, and laid out for Hyena naps in the hottest part of the afternoons.
A month later, the Hyena saw the Meerkat working again. He boisterously pounced in the direction of a feeding hare, not to catch it, but to flaunt that he was having fun while the Meerkat worked. The Meerkat didn’t even glance in the Hyena’s direction and this irritated the Hyena. He tried again. This time, he got a little closer to the Meerkat and rolled in the grass and laughed very loudly. The Meerkat continued working.
“Do Meerkats ever have fun?” he inquired.
“You will see, Hyena.” And the Meerkat continued working.
One more month passed and every day brought with it a new grey cloud. The Meerkat had finished preparing for the rainy season and was enjoying the last bit of the sun. The Hyena returned a third time, tired from playing so much in the past months. He laid down near the Meerkat’s home while he watched the Meerkat play his Meerkat games.
He chuckled (since he was too tired to laugh) and mocked the Meerkat, “You only had a week to enjoy the sun, but I had months. Don’t you wish you would have played instead of worked?”
The Meerkat smiled, “I am not sorry that I worked. In a few days, I will still be having fun and you will be sad that you played so much. You will see.”
Three days later, the grey clouds started to rain. The first day, the Hyena stayed under a tree as he was still tired from playing. The Meerkat was dry in the water resistant home he had worked hard to build. He was smiling and enjoying the relaxing patter of the raindrops above him.
The days went on and it continued to rain. The Hyena had nowhere to go but under the few surrounding trees, and even then he was getting a little wet. He was miserable and starting to catch a cold. He sneezed and coughed and sniffled until one day the Meerkat peeked out of his hole.
“Are you sneezing, Hyena? Did you catch cold?”
The humiliated Hyena nodded and sniffled again.
“Wait just a moment.” And the Meerkat disappeared. He reappeared with some herbs and berries. He scampered over to the Hyena with the remedy. “Did you learn your lesson, Hyena?”
The Hyena nodded again.
“Well, I think you have too. Come with me. I made my home big enough to share.”

Moral: Working before playing will pay off.

This is Amanda Kom and this is my blogspot. :)