Elephants and School Bags

Elephant Fact #8: Further research is needed to determine whether elephants are actually afraid of mice.

Ah, what an incredibly long week.

I had my IOC today—I got ‘The Not So Good Earth’, by Bruce Dawe as my subject. I think I did well—although I certainly could have done better—but my commentary was not without a few hideous blunders on my part.

Does this sound right to you?

“…and Dawe uses imagery in ’25-inch Chinese peasant’ in Line 1 of the poem to imply the apathetic attitude of the white people—“

A startled glance from examiner.

 “—towards the Chinese peasants. The ignorance of the white people—“

Examiner's eyes bulge slightly.

 “—is shown through the recurring motif of television in Dawe’s works, for example, Americanized. Here, the white people—oh. Oh.”

Oops.

Moving on, something hilarious happened in French class today—there’s this teacher at our school who’s a stickler for having bags that aren’t laptop bags in the classroom. 

Unfortunately, her definition of ‘laptop bags’ tends to change as daily as my underwear.

So she sort of saunters into the classroom, takes one look around and then makes this little route around the class, picking up bags on the way while the rest of us kinda just watch with our mouths open in a sort of sick, sick fascination.

Halfway through, we realize what’s going on and so there’s this massive flurry of action as people dive towards their bags and begin frantically pulling out their laptops and valuables and other sorts of things they don’t want her to hock at the local pawn shop.

Or, you know, our lunches.

And then when she finally emerges from underneath the desks like a misshapen swamp-monster, struggling under what is essentially the entire class’s textbooks on her shoulders while we struggle to reign in our laughter, she takes one look at us through narrowed eyes and says:

Zoom in on that picture, I beg you.

Looking forward to a relaxing weekend,

The Unlucky Elephant

Note: So I thought illustrating some of my blog posts would be a fun project…what do you think?