Reality

In this festive holiday season, sometimes we forget how bad things can be out there. One student of mine reminded me just how much our world needs to change on Monday.

Over the weekend her older sister was shot. She is alive and in the hospital and the man who shot her is in police custody. She was doing nothing wrong, did not know the man who shot her, and was just walking down the street.

My fifth grade student and her older brother, who is in sixth grade, are switching off every day who misses school to babysit their siblings while their mom spends the days in the hospital at her daughter’s bedside.

As an adult who has experienced the loss of a loved one, I still have no idea how to even approach my student. There is no reason that at 10 years old she should be trying to cope with such a tragedy. This student and I aren’t particularly close, but she clearly wanted to talk to someone about it when all I had to was ask her how her weekend was on Monday morning for her to tell me what happened. Her brother refuses to talk to anyone about it, and only refers to it as “the incident on Friday”.

What kind of twisted world do we live in that this is a common occurrence for my students to face?

An Ape Displaced or A Largely Unnecessary Essay on the Morality of Donkey Kong

Donkey Kong's first appearance is that of the aggressor- he kidnaps Jumpman's girlfriend Paula and for no discernable reason ascends a construction site to escape the pursuing beau. However, this plan is absurd- Donkey Kong is, after all, an ape, and his transposition from natural habitat to urban environment leaves him unprepared for long term survival.