Electricity in the sky.

Metafilter had a link to three scanned pages of two essays. Here's the link, which says it's a mirror of this site, which shows signs of bandwidth overload. While I do believe there is something special in the original formatting of documents, it's silly not to have plain text versions of the two essays for ease of dissemination. Here are plain text copies of the two essays. Everything's (sic) and the grader's handwritten comments are in parentheses following each essay.

Coming in like El Nino!
Jeremy Lavine
Period 3

El Nino is spanish. It is the spanish word for child. Like all things spanish, it is dangerous. It kills people and burns down trees. This child is more than a child. It really isn't a child at all. It is a storm. A deadly storm that kills people and burns down trees.

Warm water usually builds up around australia. But not anymore with el nino. El Nino moves the warm water from australia to somewhere else, namely to other places. Where are these other places? These are places that also have water, but water that is usually not as warm as the warm water El Nino moves to these said other places. These other places are to the east. Of the water.

In Peru, they have many names for many things. One of the things they have names for is for people who go fishing, go fishing to make a living. If we had a word for this kind of people that word would be "fisherman". But we don't. In Peru, they have different names for things than we do in America. They call that kind of people "pescadores". That's Spanish. That's what they speak in Peru. When El Nino comes, these "pescadores" can't catch any fish. El Nino is caused when the Peruvian gods get angry. They have been angry for millions of years and have made El Nino for millions of years. Many many moons ago, the Peruvians committeed human sacrifice to satiate their gods and end the flood that was caused by El Nino. In today's modern dog-eat-dog work-a-day world of scientists, diplomats, McSalad Shakers, and George Bush Jr., we no longer have access to such solutions. We are too proud. We will not commit human sacrifices. We refuse to satiate the Peruvian gods. Thus, they remain angry and keep killing us and burning down our trees with El Nino.

Instead of satiating the gods, many of these "scientists" have tried to control El Nino with "science". They put up expensive fish-attracting bueys that run on flashlight batteries. Imagine, fighting the power of the gods with flashlight batteries! Needless to say, this didn't work and everyone died.

(Jeremy Please a little less drama!)

Lightning!!!
Jeremy Lavine
Period 3

What is lightning? Where does it come from? What does it mean? Does it have a meaning? Where does it come from? What is it made of? Is it made of light? Some might say it was made of light. Others contend that lightning is made of fire. People used to think that lightning was made of fire. Fire in the sky. Fire that killed people and knocked down trees. Before Benjamin Franklin. Benjamin Franklin was a founding father. He fatherly founded that lightning is made of electricity. Electricity in the sky.

But what of the Greek myths, of the Greek god Zeus and of the popular image of Zeus - a Greek God - throwing down lightning bolts to kill people and knock down trees. Where did he find the time? And what of lightning being made of fire? In this workaday world in the era of the founding father Benjamin Franklin we have no time nor patience for such concerns. These are for the third world and schizophrenics.

Some people do not understand that lightning is destructive. They ignore the wisdom of their elders and of the founding father Benjamin Franklin. They think lightning is a lie perpetrated by people with a vested interest. At their own peril!!! Lightning kills people and knocks down trees!!! It a power of destruction exercised by the Greek god Zeus, the mightiest of Greek gods!! But they do it: they ignore such wisdom and taunt the powerful exercise of destruction and they worship their idle gods and stand near trees. At their own peril!! Lightning has the killing power to kill people and the destructive power to knock down trees! When you stand near trees, they will be knocked down by lightning and you will be killed by lightning! There is no escape. Lightning will knock down the tree and knock down your soul. Trees are tall.

Many things are tall. Many things attract lightning. But do the two correlate? A recent study says yes. It says that being tall and attracting lightning do correlate. That means that being tall corellates with being struck by lightning. You die when you are struck by lightning, and your tree is knocked down.

Some people try to measure lightning, they take measurements of it. They use balloons and rockets and their imagination and determination and research money and they put it all in the mixing bowl and they mix in storms - storms with lightning - and so they mix in the lightning and then they get the product if they're lucky of measurements about lightning from the storm? What kind of measurements? We may never know ...

(Jeremy, what the heck is this? This is only one step beyond rambling and babbling. Can you get it together.)
*******************
Since Superelectric does respect the original form, I will describe some of its formatting. They are double spaced pages of times text with a few handwritten notes, here reproduced in parentheses. The first essay's "Like all things spanish...." sentence is circled and question marked. Paragraphs are usually represented by indents, but since I know the double b but don't know the indent, here they're presented as floating blocks. The second n in El Nino is always tilded, but again, I am too lazy to reproduce these accurately.

The supposed grader of the two essays is pretty bad. The only notes are, essentially, "OMFGWTF?!" There are several grammatical notes that could be added. The run on in the last paragraph of lightning, while brilliant, is pretty obviously a run on. Fragments abound, like "At their own peril!!", which also features uncorrected multiple punctuation. Punctuation is incorrectly placed outside of quotation marks, etc. Many obvious errors that should be noted escape the grader.

There are also several phrases that would fall into the category of bad writing. Take a look at the second paragraph of El Nino. Little things like being able to hook the last sentence's "Of the water" fragment to the preceding sentence should be marked off. Also, the "namely to other places" should be elided, as should the "said other places" segment. I point these out not to criticize anybody, but because the whole deal stinks of having been made up. We're presented these two essays as scanned, graded essay pages, and so we are meant to assume that these are actual pages from a student trying to write real essays about lightning and El Nino. However, there are small indications which make me feel that these are intentional works of comedy. Things like the shitty grader comments, which are in no way helpful.

Yes, there are bad teachers who aren't fictitious. I'm reminded of an incident in my high school sophomore English class. The teacher was handing back a batch of graded essays and giving the usual high school English teacher spiel of "why are these so shitty?". She decided to read aloud and comment on the mistakes of one particular essay as a learning experience for the students whom she'd cowed into a sad realization of their ineptitude. She didn't read the name of the essay's author, but as soon as she started reading aloud, the author spoke up to protest the use of his essay as an anti-exemplar. The teacher pointed out that nobody would've known that he was the author had he not identified himself. He said that it didn't matter, he was pissed either way. Which I think is a fair response. Sure, nobody would have known, but by naming himself, he happily outed his shame and was able to share his own guilt with the teacher, which is a pretty slick strategic move. Shame, like happiness, was born a twin. Several awkward moments passed and the class continued. I would like to add that I was not the author in question, just the guy who sat next to him in the great big circle of desks, so arranged to create a collegial atmosphere and which in reality creates a death star like focus on the only free element, the teacher.

At any rate, there are plenty of bad teachers out there, and plenty of bad teachers with really poor ideas regarding helpful criticism, so the fact that the grader in the above texts is so poor isn't necessarily telling, but the poverty of comments and lack of in text error correction are suspicious.

The spelling on the essays is pretty good. The only mistake I caught was "corellate" in Lightning!!!'s "Many things are tall" paragraph. There the error's obvious as the word is spelled correctly two other times in the same paragraph. As the only misspelled word in the two essays, it stands out. If the author were using a spell-checking program, it would've caught "corellate" and, most likely, the capitalization errors in the first essay. It's obvious placement and singularity make the misspelling seem intentional.

There are many phrase repetitions in the text, making it read very much like "ninjas are totally sweet." In Lightning!!!, the repetition joke is about a tree getting knocked down, and it appears almost as a punchline in the "Many things are tall" paragraph. After the ridiculously vague opening statement, there are three repetitions of the sentiment that "being tall is correlated with being hit by lightning," and then the paragraph ends with a reference to the earlier goofy statement about trees being knocked down. Here, though, it's rephrased from "knock down trees" to "your tree is knocked down," adding a possession which doesn't exist in any of the other uses of the phrase. It does make it flow nicely with the preceding clause. That it is rephrased in such a manner makes it seem an intentional joke.

"Work-a-day" and a variant are used and seem odd for a naive, apparently American writer. They feel self-conscious, like Mr. Burns' "Ahoy-hoy" telephone greeting. The workaday list includes W and McSalad Shakers alongside scientists and diplomats, which also reads like intended comedy.

I'm not concluding it's real or it's fake. Basically, my stance is that it's really funny and enjoyable entirely on its own terms. I'm not particularly fond of the genre of "teachers poking fun at their students," as I tend to think the former are awful cunts, but I think that these two essays are worthwhile for what they are.

You know, I've often tossed around the thought of becoming a teacher myself. Stuff like this makes me think twice, though. If I were really handed these essays, I would be torn about grading it. On the one hand, I'd think it's really funny and great and it would probably be a better piece of writing than anything else I'd be handed. I would want to reward its aesthetic accomplishment with a high mark. On the other hand, it's a style of writing that's not going to get an A in another person's class. It's full of shitty writing which is overly repetitive and in no way serves to communicate information. Here's the real problem with school. It's not about educating towards excellence. In English classes, you're not teaching about striving for aesthetic refinement, it's about creating robot members of society who can function first to serve their teacher masters and then, in life, their boss masters. They have to be able to spit out reports and emails about nonsense in a manner devoid of humor and originality, all written in dull business speak which respects a limited set of ideas and motivations. Creativity like this cries out to be squashed by school.

Teachers have an interest in producing students that can parrot back the stories that the teachers feed them. And I don't just mean the rote learning of facts, dates, etc. I actually don't have much of a problem with that stuff. It's the wishy-washy thinking skills type learning that's to blame. The more vague the curriculum, the less standard what can be evaluated, the greater emphasis is placed on playing the teacher. Students succeed not on true originality or intelligence, but on learning what the teacher values, understanding how the teacher frames information. It's not unlike learning a language. Once you've picked up on the teacher's language, the student only has to spit back the information that the teacher wants in a way that the teacher likes to hear. It is a fundamental dumbing down of curriculum, moving it from factual education to a con game.

For my psych 101 analysis, I'd like to offer: educators, having been brought up in an environment which was quite rigid and rote, in which grammar was a solid thing to be memorized, decided to cast off the bonds which they so hated and create a more personable, friendly curriculum which taught towards more real goals, things that are useful, creating solid thinking skills in their students. Really, this is just tossing off one set of arbitrary goals for another, mushier one. It makes me worry about fascism and totalitarianism.

What's appealing about learning facts by rote is that it creates an asocial context which then forces the students to create their own language for dealing with those facts. Yes, the teacher can and will influence and, to a large, extent, create that context, but at least you give the kids a fighting chance at being original and creative. When you stop teaching people facts and start teaching them how to think, isn't that scarier? Isn't that more dangerous? The fundamental lesson is not one of true excellence, but of social utility. Does this essay say what my audience wants to hear? It priveleges con over substance. See Rush Limbaugh.

Well, that's all very off-topic, but I did want to share those two really funny essays.

Posted by mattb at January 15, 2004 04:50 PM