Exemplary Prose From Our Most Promising Youth
I recently stumbled across an email from my good friend, Paul. It was a small collection of essays sent to a group of several of us who all had the same infamous eleventh-grade Honors English teacher together. It reminded us of Mr. Gerkin’s uncompromising literary standards and the enduring influence he had on us as writers.
The original essays are posted here, and are given only as scanned images. I have mirrored them here for your convenience. Click on each thumbnail to see the whole thing.
El Niņo
Most high school essays on El Niņo would be sterile regurgitations of an entry in the World Book Encyclopaedia, or more likely, a brushed-up cut-and-paste from How Stuff Works. This young auteur transcends the antiseptic account of science by convincingly tying a meteorological phenomonon together with our most primal fears (which are about dying and seeing trees burn down).
Lightning
Sometimes trees don’t burn, but does it shake the human psyche any less to see them knocked down? Again the axe is laid to the root of Enlightenment scientific bravado as the same young wordsmith expounds not just the nature, but the true human significance, of lightning. So good it took two pages!
Walt Whitman: A Biography
This touching tribute isn’t content merely to grapple with the difficult circumstances of Whitman’s life, but instead it artfully identifies them with the full scope of the ugly viscera of the human condition. As such it contains some profanity, but it is easy enough to bowdlerize for reading to younger aspiring writers. (Homeschool parents, take note!)
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- Posted by Tim on Saturday, November 6, 2004 at 10:35:18 am PST
- Category: Miscellany
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10 Responses to “Exemplary Prose From Our Most Promising Youth”
What do I need to do actually to be able to read these? Clicking on the thumbnails only produces a larger, still-unreadable image.
Comment Permalink | Posted on November 6th, 2004 at 1:50 pm |Funny, Mrs. Berglund had the same reaction at first.
If we are an IE user, first stop using it and switch to Firefox. Failing that, hover over the bigger-but-unreadable image in IE until an inscrutable square icon appears at the image’s lower right corner. (It happens just after the mini toolbar appears at the upper left. It takes about two seconds total.) Click on this icon, and you will see the image zoomed in all the way. You’ll probably have to scroll around a bit to see the whole thing, but at least you’ll be able to read the text.
If you’re already numbered among the elect/using Firefox, just click anywhere on the bigger-but-unreadable image to zoom in on it. No hovering waiting for a mystery icon to appear anywhere. Plus tabbed browsing!
Let me know if that doesn’t do it. You do need to read these. They’re pretty funny.
Comment Permalink | Posted on November 6th, 2004 at 2:49 pm |Bite your tongue! I had Firefox installed LONG before the likes of YOU told me to!
OTOH, I did need you to tell me how to use it… {blush}
Comment Permalink | Posted on November 7th, 2004 at 8:54 pm |Ah, good for you! Firefox rulez0rz.
These were pretty good, huh?
Comment Permalink | Posted on November 7th, 2004 at 9:50 pm |To see the images, check your Options in Firefox (also IE, too if you still use that old thing) and ensure that under “Advanced” under “Multimedia” there is NO checkmark next to “resize large images to fit in browser window.”
And they are wicked funny. It’s times like these I wish that I worked in a home office (like some people) and could actually laugh out loud.
Comment Permalink | Posted on November 8th, 2004 at 6:41 am |The El Nino piece had us giggling, but we realised by the second piece that this was a one trick pony a la Dave Barry. Funny? You bet. Perchance time will create a more diverse, nuanced humor. You would hate to see another young person suffer the truncated success and cash flow of Dave Barry.
More important than enjoying the humor, though, is to note where these postmodern minds allow for the supernatural and reveal a worldview which does not rule out the importance of satiating spiritual demiurges. We theists would have to shout a hearty Amen! when youth like this make such a metaphysical stand. Flashlight batteries to counter the will of the gods indeed.
Comment Permalink | Posted on November 8th, 2004 at 11:02 am |The images work perfectly with Safari - if you happen to be using a Mac.
Wicked funny indeed.
Comment Permalink | Posted on November 8th, 2004 at 8:43 pm |I’ve read these twice and, I must say, they just get funnier with every reading. I shared them with my hubby and he’s convinced someone was faking them, no way could they be that rediculous.
Comment Permalink | Posted on November 12th, 2004 at 9:33 pm |Our Future: Our Kids
Remember that thought when you go and read this post from Tim Berlund’s blog. Mind his note about the last one. I had my hubby read them and he said “no way are these real.” Sad, but they graduate kids who can’t read so it’s entirely possible. I’…
Comment Permalink | Posted on November 12th, 2004 at 9:44 pm |Oh my! I knew that some kids were a little weird, but this is just off the chart. I laughed so much at El Nino, but the lightening one showed how obsessed this kid is with the old myths and gods. It’s a little disturbing. The sarcasm in the Walt Whitman one was priceless though and I loved it.
Comment Permalink | Posted on November 15th, 2004 at 1:33 pm |