Today she has been toiling in the unforgiving land of the high school special project, and the flavor of the day is French. Her assignment is to write a children's book. Not only that, they have to illustrate it themselves (no cutting and pasting clip-art) AND use vocabulary from the chapter they just finished.
This might explain why it took her 8 hours to finish this assignment. Neatness counts, grammar and vocabulary counts and illustrations count. I hope that insane creativity counts as well, because this particular story has a rabbit, a squirrel, a duck, a cow, a chicken and a horse that are friends and enjoy going to do activities in the future like eating dinner in a restaurant, going to the movies, and taking the metro to the forest to swim in the lake. Given the vocabulary constraints and the language difficulties, Hemmingway could do no better.
This whole project brought back horrific memories of my own ninth-grade English project: An "Old Man and the Sea" diorama. Being profoundly artistically handicapped, I complained loud and hard about having to an art project for English class, but my arguments fell on deaf ears as it was explained to me that this assignment was for "those students who weren't strong writers."
Uhhyeah.
So, I went home and made the saddest excuse for a diorama ever. It looked like "The Old Man and the Sea after the Hurricane" but to put it somewhat indelicately, what it really was was "Shit in a Shoebox." Despite the fact that my grade for this particular project reflected the time and effort put forth (not to mention my lack of artistic abilities) I was pretty bitter about the whole thing. Obviously, I still am.
I should have put Peeps in my diorama.
Peeps make everything better.
I'm pleased to say that TeenTuna has finally finished her project. The rabbit, duck. squirrel, chicken, horse and crazy cow are really cute and their story is full of adventures. I hope the teacher recognizes the effort and creativity in this project. It's a billion times better than my crappy diorama, and Fabio the bunny should thank his lucky stars that he is so very busy. His social calendar could never fit in a shoebox.
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