And then they had to kill him with a silver bullet, which someone decided was a great Band Name!
I graduated from high school two years ago and I remember that my AP English classes had very similar questions. In all of my English classes I can’t remember anyone watching a movie for a report. Personally, I loved Beowulf. My English teacher had us read it aloud and we spent many weeks deciphering the strange Old English.
As said before, the mom is what really gets me. I would have never gotten away with that. My mom and dad would have grounded my butt. She’ll probably get a D and be upset about it.
Two of my sisters are definite helicopter moms. My favorite niece (elder cousin to this one) recently came close to getting an F on a paper she clearly phoned in, as she disregarded a specific instruction from the teacher which would have been trivial to avoid and in so doing exposed the fact that she hadn’t read the source materials she was citing. Even though the teacher gave her the opportunity to recoup the lost points, her mother still raised hell.
But the sister in this story is worse. She does my niece’s science fair project every year (and is always bugging me and our baby sister to explain statistics and such to her). Her daughter is going to have a hard time of it in college, as her straight As don’t come close to representing her own work.
We did Beowulf in 9th grade, complete with similar questions, and I went to, pretty much, a school for ants.
I’d have handed the kid my copy of Gardner’s Grendel*, told her it was the edited version, and that we had already loaned out the movie to another kid with the same quest for mendacious mediocrity.
Heh–the only paper I nearly failed in high school was because I’d read the source material. We were supposed to write a research paper on an author and quote from at least three sources about the author. I reluctantly dug up three critics’ takes on Vonnegut and put their quotes in, but the bulk of the paper was my (adolescent) analysis of themes in Vonnegut.
The teacher called me in for a conference explaining that I hadn’t really fulfilled the assignment. It wasn’t until she realized that I’d never read Vonnegut before and had read 10 of his novels in the course of researching him that she relented.
She wasn’t my favorite teacher.
Ordinarily I’m way eviller than you, Tom, but I can’t lie about Beowulf. It is the greatest of all epic poems.
'Cept for Gilgamesh, of course. And the Odyssey. And The Iliad and –
Okay, it’s the greatest of all ENGLISH LANGUAGE epic poems.
Am I a street urchin for thinking The Song of Hiawatha is way better?
No. You are, however, a filthy Communist atheist devil-worshipping Muslim for doing so. And you probably eat puppies without even killing them first, starting at the hind feet so as to maximum their suffering.
Heh, reminds me of one trick I pulled back in high school (I was, I think, 14). The assignment was to read any two books from a very long list during the holidays, and do either a 10 minute presentation of either of them for the rest of the class, or two 5 minutes ones.
On the last day of the holidays, around bedtime, I realized I had hum… forgotten, yes, that’s it, forgotten to read a single line. And, in my defense, in my panic, I still did set out to pull an all nighter to speed-read through the short one. Only I fell asleep after about three chapters. So, on the next day, I came up with a cunning plan. As my turn to present my book came, I confidently walked to the front of the class, and spent a good chunk of time detailing, in laborious detail, what happened in those three chapters. Only it turned out “a good chunk of time” amounted to about 90 seconds. The teacher still seemed to expect something of me.
So, switching to plan B : I improvised. The book was apparently about pirates, boats and stuff, and all those books are the same. Scurvy, treasure, cannon, betrayal over treasure, rum, lost appendages and tragic fate to those consumed by greed. String any of those in any order and you’re bound to come pretty close, right ? So I closed my eyes, clenched my butt cheeks and made it all up. And it went… perfectly fine. The teacher took notes and everything. I could believe neither my luck, nor the obvious, world-shattering truth : the teacher hadn’t read the book either.
And I would have gone away with it, too. If that *bitch *hadn’t done her stupid presentation on the same stupid book.
If we’re going to get all confessional…
I went to a college that did not use blue books, at least not in the liberal arts section; all exams were done on the student’s notepaper. Because of this, and because the English department was very small, I had began preparing a cunning plan my first semester; basically, it consisted of always numbering the pages of an exam I was turning in. This proved useful when I was a senior and taking a class on-- oh, let’s say Cooper. The exam had 3 sections, the middle of which was 10 short answer questions. Reading the entire exam through before I wrote down anything, I realized I had no idea what the answer to question #2 was. So I stretched out the answers to the previous questions so I was able to begin that item at the end of the page–probably page 2. I then deliberately skipped to page 4 and started writing what looked like the second sentence of #3 and turned it in.
Two days later, the teacher (also my advisor and mentor!) returned the exam. Looking embarrassed, she said that she’d somehow lost a page of my test and had decided, after consulting with another teacher, that she might as well give me full credit for that question, since I was a A student and this was clearly her fault.
Another confession. The same year–hell, the same semester–I was taking a a physics class One exam in that class was quite brutal. There were 3 questions, of which you had to pick 2 to answer. As you may have already guessed I had been slacking off that term. Looking at question 1, I saw that I didn’t know the answer; looking at question 2, I saw that I didn’t even understand the question. Thankfully I knew #3. On question 1 I wrote “omit.” On #2 I wrote, “I do not know the answer and will not waste your time by bullshitting.” I wrote a perfectly brilliant answer to question 3, as I didn’t have to waste time on anything else.
I got a B. The teacher gave me partial credit for the No BS answer, as he found my honesty refreshing.
Beowulf is only in English if you perform a bit of linguistic stretching. Anglo-Saxon is a better term for the language, given that “Hwæt! wē Gār-Dena in geār-dagum, þeod-cyninga, þrym gefrunon, hu ða æþelingas ellen fremedon.” is not going to be understood by even the most priggish of the traditionalist prescriptivist English teachers.
You are over-analyzing my rambling, man. You might wishto follow my favorite sister’s policy, which is, she said recently, to ignore every other sentence I utter. 
Or your niece’s, which is to maximize her intake of Angelina Jolie.
( :: ducks and runs really fucking fast :: )
Too late. I’ve already released the gerbils, and they have your scent.
Reminds me of the movie Back to School
[after Diane gives Thornton an ‘F’ for his report, which was actually written by Kurt Vonnegut]
Diane: Whoever did write this doesn’t know the first thing about Kurt Vonnegut!
Another off topic confession:
In eighth grade we had an assignment to do a dramatic reading in front of the rest of the class. Now, I was a good student, got good grades, but somehow had totally forgotten this assignment. The teacher is calling us up, one by one, in alphabetical order and my name is, naturally, my name will be soon. The only book I have with me is our textbook, so I’m pretending to listen while surreptitiously flipping through the book, looking for ANYTHIN suitable.
I settle on the final segment of Longfellow’s Evangeline. The throb in my voice as I read the poorhouse scene, with the graves at the end, is from pure fear. The teacher sits in the back, making notes as we read.
I got an A-, with the comment “obviously well prepared”. How I faked it I’ll never know, the teacher was no fool.
Nope. This was long ere Snopes–1991 or so. I had been keeping that idea in reserve for years. Anyway, it only works once per person, and only if the teacher will be inclined to believe you would have gotten a good answer anyway. I’d never have dared it in Physics.
You know, you went into the wrong field. You really should’ve been a psychic.