Nuclear Tests, Swine Flu, Immunity, and Teaching Metaphor to Children

I just heard that North Korea has been performing underground nuclear tests and that most of the world is not all that happy about it. Perhaps I should watch the news more, but I doubt it. Anyways, Obama's miffed, South Korea's a little perturbed, and I'm sure other countries care to some degree, they're just not mentioned on the MSN homepage hotmail sends me to when I logout.

Still, at the school, the nuclear tests haven't been raising as much concern as the swine flu epidemic. Evidently a few foreigners have brought a resurgence of the dreaded disease into the city not a few massive blocks from where I teach, and since foreigners do nothing but fornicate and languish in each others' sordid, endemic, parasitic hovels or the equally infested hangout hotbeds of diseases frequented in our spare time, we've become greater pariahs of late. So until further notice we're being subjected to daily temperature checks, have been issued filtered face masks, and it's been recommended to us that when we're not at school we confine ourselves to our apartments. The jokes on them though, I've pretty much been doing that anyway.

It not all bad, however; I've been working on a new story idea and this little hysteria has played directly into inspirational material for the plot. The working title is "Immunity". I'll let you ponder the rest for now. At least until I get a little further along and post it on my writing blog:

http://fosterink.blogspot.com/ (I'm trying to work more [shameless] plugs in.)

Stuff in the classroom seems to progressing relatively well; by that I mean I'm still working and haven't been fired yet. I've been teaching poetry to third graders for a few classes now... as though poetry isn't hard enough to get in one's native language. Still, I feel like I'm making headway. The word for the day was Metaphor. Since we've already covered imagery, simile, personification, alliteration and rhyme scheme, I figured it was time. One of their worksheets had a list of words that the two kids had to create metaphors for. The first was "star".

"So, I can write, 'sparkling flower'?"

I'd never heard of a sparkling flower so I thought about it for a second. It was a second that ignited a whole conceit! If a star is a sparkling flower, then space can be the garden in which it grows, the milky way the water nourishing it and the other plan(e)ts in the garden's midst. The possibilities were endless. I got excited and tried to share this with the blank faces looking back at me and finally decided that, yes, a sparkling flower would do fine. My writing on the matter is far from over.

From the mouth of babes...


- Foster