Anybody care to predict the grade this paper will receive?

[Skald_the_Rhymer]

One of my many sisters came to my house this morning, accompanied by 15-year-old daughter, one of my many nieces. They wanted to borrow a copy of Beowulf. The conversation went something like this:

SIS: Do you have a copy of Beowulf? The Kid here has to do a report on it for school.

ME: Which one do you want? I have at least three. I have one in a Norton anthology in modern English prose, and one just in Old English, and one edition which has both the Old English on one page and a modern English translation in verse on the opposite page. That one’s probably best.

KID: Oh, none of those. Do you have a copy of the movie?

ME: Um, no. You realize I only own three DVDs, right? But I think my stepdaughter does. Anyway, if she has to write a report on the poem, she should probably read it. The movie’s not all all that faithful.

SIS: Never mind. I’ll just borrow **Cinderella the Rhymer’s **version. Kid, run to your cousin’s room and see if you can find it and make sure you leave her a note.

ME: Wait! What’s the exact assightment?

KID: (checking assignment sheet) It can be either on the use of poetic devices in Beowulf or on the tension between Christian and pagan influences on the poem. I’ll just watch the movie! (runs to Cinderella’s room)

ME: Okay, seriously, sis, y’all need to borrow the parallel translation, or at least get the Spark notes. She’s not going to get what she needs from the movie, unless you need another reason to hate Angelina Jolie.

SIS: We don’t have time to read it, and it’s hard anyway. I just want the short version.

ME: The movie isn’t the *short *version. It’s the version crafted by someone who spent the entire movie-making process under the influence of hallucinogenic drugs.

SIS: Oh, stop being so snobbish. We doesn’t have time to read all that crap, and who cares about it anyway? It’s just about old dead vikings. Is there any real difference?

ME: (goggling) Well, um, basically everything except for the name of the main characters. And as the dialogue in the movie is not delivered in poetic form, she can’t get information on kennings and such.

SIS: Why do you ALWAYS exaggerate?

KId: (returning from Cinderella’s bedroom with copy of Beowulf and, for mysterious reasons, illegal copies of Wolverine & Star Trek). Got 'em. I’m ready to go!

ME: Wait! Baby, you know, I DO have a mostly useless degree in English literature, and I’ve written my senior paper on poetry of that period when I was an undergrad, and I’ve read Beowulf at least twenty times. I can help you with your paper tomorrow afternoon.

SIS: No, that won’t work. You don’t know how to write like a child. Never mind. We’ll just watch this and do the paper from that.

ME: But…

SIS: It’ll be fine.

KID: Thanks, Uncle Dude!

I’m willing to bet this paper will get a grade other than A.

[Cisco]

I like how your stepdaughter gets the doper name of a famous stepdaughter :).

Unfortunately, while your niece and her mom have awful attitudes about education, the fact that she’s gotten this far and it’s worked out for her tells me that the paper will do just fine. She’s really going to struggle if she goes to college, though, and I blame her mom.

[Enginerd]

G-.

[ITR_champion]

If it’s a public school then she’ll get an A.

[Lynn_Bodoni]

I’m willing to bet this paper will get a grade other than A.

Wow, you’re a real risk-taker, aren’t you?

If there is any justice in the class, then Kid will get an F. If the teacher is not allowed to give a failing grade (this is seriously being proposed here in some Texas school districts, but that’s a whole nother subject), and there is justice, she’ll get a D-.

[Claire_Beauchamp]

That just makes me very, very sad. Not because of the kid, kids always try to pull crap like that. Because of the mom.

sigh

[chappachula]

@Skald_the_Rhymer

ME: What’s the exact assightment?

KID: (checking assignment sheet) It can be either on the use of poetic devices in Beowulf or on the tension between Christian and pagan influences on the poem. .

umm…it seems to me that,actually, those 2 choices are both pretty sophisticated issues for a 15 year old to write about.*
And it seems like the teacher must have spent a semester or more doing some actual teaching (and not just summarizing the plot) ,trying to get the kids to learn abstract concepts.

so what I’m wondering is: how the heck has the kid not read even one line of the poem yet?

*I dunno—but I would think a less-demanding teacher would just assign something like " define the Christian and pagan influences in the poem, and give 3 examples of each". Not “discusss the tension between…”, which assumes the kid had read the poem carefully, and knows the themes well.
And, please, please tell us what grade she receives!

[Sampiro]

I wonder how many students have flunked assignments based on SCARLET LETTER due to the Demi Moore movie by now.

I have no problem with students using Sparknotes, which are mostly online full-text and have some side-by-side [original/translation] versions for ancient/medieval/Renaissance works. It would be ridiculous to expect a high school student to be up on the ways of the Dark Age Anglo-Saxon customs and cadence. BUT, anybody who’s ever seen the movie and read the book should know one tain’t the other; Harry Potter’s about as close as it comes and even they have major omissions.

A professor here had an ingenious thing going for a couple of years until word got out. She assigned the book The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman, and always had an essay question on Miss Jane’s motivations and actions in the final scene of the book.

Anyone who’s seen the incredible TV movie with Cicely Tyson knows the super powerful final scene in which Miss Jane, a 110 year old ex slave, drinks from a WHITE’S ONLY water fountain. Well, that scene’s not in the book; the filmmakers added it because they felt while the final scene in the book works just fine Miss Jane boards a bus to go to the March on Washingtonit would be too expensive to re-create the actual historical event and too anti-climactic if it was just people waving bye-bye, so they rescripted it for a great film (and inexpensive) film piece.

Anyway, she said that in the two years she asked this question, in which she told students up front “You will not do well on this test if you only watch the movie”, every year at least half and usually more of the students told about the water fountain as the final scene.

[Fretful_Porpentine]

I predict a C-. Sadly, I suspect half the class will attempt something equally stupid, and the teacher will give up on flunking them in exhaustion.

One of the few redeeming features of that movie is that it functions so well as a trap for lazy students.

[Mosier]

@Fretful_Porpentine

I predict a C-. Sadly, I suspect half the class will attempt something equally stupid, and the teacher will give up on flunking them in exhaustion.

One of the few redeeming features of that movie is that it functions so well as a trap for lazy students.

I think the assignment would have been more seriously approached by the students if there WASN’T a movie version.

The movie isn’t all that completely different from the poem, though. The order he fights the monsters in is pretty much the same.

[nikonikosuru]

Ahahahaha, oh geez.

Well you did the best you could. You can’t say you didn’t warn them! I’m curious as to what grade she’ll get and I won’t be able to rest until you post a follow up. Was it a normal English class or AP English?

[Neverender]

@chappachula

umm…it seems to me that,actually, those 2 choices are both pretty sophisticated issues for a 15 year old to write about.*
And it seems like the teacher must have spent a semester or more doing some actual teaching (and not just summarizing the plot) ,trying to get the kids to learn abstract concepts.

so what I’m wondering is: how the heck has the kid not read even one line of the poem yet?

*I dunno—but I would think a less-demanding teacher would just assign something like " define the Christian and pagan influences in the poem, and give 3 examples of each". Not “discusss the tension between…”, which assumes the kid had read the poem carefully, and knows the themes well.
And, please, please tell us what grade she receives!

Maybe in the US, but it’s pretty standard, if not perhaps a little harder* than the kind of questions you’d get at GCSE English in England, though Shakespeare is FAR more likely to be the focus than any other topic.

*maybe a bit closer to A level English.

At both levels, good identification of the themes would be required though.

(No cite, but I only finsished my GCSE’s 4 years ago, and the curriculum isn’t likely to have dumbed down that much in the mean time).

You located in the US, Skald?

[Boyo_Jim]

The teacher only watched to movie too.

A+

[Sampiro]

You should have volunteered just to tell her the story, starting with the part where Beo is first bitten by the wolf and has until the Full Moon to find a cure.

[ToeJam]

She’ll get a B.

If that was my sister though, I’d be chastising the crap outta her for putting up with that stuff. Though I did that from an early age- I forced her always to do her work the right way- just develop the love of reading in the child and keep it there to avoid these sorts of problems down the road. It meant lots of taunting and telling her how much cooler X was in the Book than the Movie and then giving her good books and all to read… But that’s when we were both kids…
So thankfully this scene will never happen for me… Because if it does… my sister’s going to get a good verbal beatdown on academia.

[Baker]

It isn’t as if this sort of thing is new. My mother, who attended high school in the latter 1940’s, tells the story of a student who tried to do a book presentation on Bambi. He based his report on the Disney movie.

[Skald_the_Rhymer]

@Sampiro

You should have volunteered just to tell her the story, starting with the part where Beo is first bitten by the wolf and has until the Full Moon to find a cure.

No, that would be too actively dickish. 'Sides, I love Beowulf too much to accomplish that. “Then in the mist over the moor-hills Grendel came walking, bearing God’s anger. This was not the first time he had come to the hall of Hrothgar…”

I’d end up writing the paper just for kicks. It’s BEOWULF, without which we would have no Lord of the Rings, after all.

[Skald_the_Rhymer]

@chappachula

umm…it seems to me that,actually, those 2 choices are both pretty sophisticated issues for a 15 year old to write about.*
And it seems like the teacher must have spent a semester or more doing some actual teaching (and not just summarizing the plot) ,trying to get the kids to learn abstract concepts.

so what I’m wondering is: how the heck has the kid not read even one line of the poem yet?

It’s an advanced class, I think, though I don’t really know. But I expect the assignment is tailored as to ferret out movie-only watchers.

[Rigamarole]

@Lynn_Bodoni

Wow, you’re a real risk-taker, aren’t you?

If there is any justice in the class, then Kid will get an F. If the teacher is not allowed to give a failing grade (this is seriously being proposed here in some Texas school districts, but that’s a whole nother subject), and there is justice, she’ll get a D-.

Um, she’s 15 years old. What world did you go to high school in?

If she completes the assignment and at least attempts to address the topic and follow the assignment directions she’ll do fine.

[tr0psn4j]

SIS: No, that won’t work. You don’t know how to write like a child. Never mind. We’ll just watch this and do the paper from that.

Yep, it’s all too common but the quoted part was by far the worst. It’s bad enough the kid didn’t read it now your sister assumes you would write it for her (if you could write like a child). Sadly, that’s the reason why my cousins stopped coming to me for homework help. I would refuse to do it for them.

For what it’s worth, I passed my pre-Beowulf, The Movie English class without reading the book or some cliff notes or cheating. I’m not sure how I pulled it off but it did happen.

So this Beowulf is worth reading huh?