August 06, 2007
Don't Tell Me That
So, the phone rings and a woman asks me if I can see if we have a certain movie. Well, of course I can. She wants The Bell Jar (1979). As I'm typing it in, she notes that it's also a book by Sylvia Plath (I was aware of this). Sure enough:
"Nope. We have a few copies of the book, but no movie."
"Oh, okay. Yeah, they assigned the book to my kids last Thursday and they have to have it done by Tuesday, so I'm trying to find the movie. It's ridiculous. That book is two inches thick."
Well, gee. If you'd told me that in the first place, I could have told you we didn't have it without even looking it up.
(For the record, "two inches thick" is a ludicrous claim. Our large print copy isn't that thick. The regular paperback is 288 pages long. I estimate it would take me well under 6 hours to polish off. Also, by all accounts, the movie version is a wretched adaptation. Call me vicious, but I hope those kids get caught and/or fail accordingly.)
Posted by Jared at August 6, 2007 12:13 PM | TrackBackIt was assigned on Thursday and due on Tuesday ... and she's calling on Monday, complaining that they don't have enough time?
I suppose we can hope that they at least tried reading it over the weekend and failed ....
Now, it does seem odd to allow such short turnaround on a book. Who's assigning this? Summer school?
In any case, if multiple kids have to read the same book, then I'm guessing an entire class or group does. That almost certainly means the authorities did not first assign this on Thursday. They couldn't expect everybody to get copies of the text that quickly.
Posted by: Wilson at August 6, 2007 01:51 PMYes, there were a number of odd features, and I don't know who the assignment came from or why there might have been such a supposedly short turn-around. It's still enough time to read the book unless you're a whiny semi-literate, but the short time is certainly unusual.
I had to wonder, based on the timing of her call and the date it had to be read by, if perhaps they had only just informed her of the assignment and their extreme lack of progress.
Posted by: Blame Jared at August 6, 2007 04:35 PMMy guess would be that the kids at least sort of knew they needed to read the book already; but then they got clearer directions or a reminder on Thursday; but then they neglected to tell mommy until today or yesterday.
That's assuming that this is anything like a standard educational situation, and also that the mother was being quite accurate about the same book's being assigned to multiple kids.
Of course, for all we know, the kids are just lying outright to the mother about when the book was assigned. She seems to have raised them for that sort of thing.
Posted by: Wilson at August 6, 2007 07:52 PM