Monday, November 9, 2009

School

Today, I decided to post something a little philosophical that came to my mind while reading.


"Shoot," Char says. "I sure ain't looking at that face forty-five minutes every day. No way."

This sentence pretty much represents for me the "cruelty" of children / teenagers. Not in a physical way of meaning of course. But it is a perfect example of the insensibility kids and especially young adults display sometimes. They either don't care or don't understand that they can hurt other people in that way really badly. It's probably only in retrospect that they understand how mean they might have been to someone else. And I think it's especially hard for a teenager to be confronted with these things. You're probably not very sure of yourself anyway, so being exposed to these kinds of verbal attacks is very tough. The sentence above is directed at a teacher, so hopefully, as she is already grown up and apparently has seen a lot of things ("She's letting Charlese know that she's traveled all over the world, and there's nothing Charlese can say about her face that she ain't heard in at least four different languages."), she doesn't mind it too much. She might know from her own upgrowing that teenagers are like this, that they still see adults mostly as "higher beings", maybe even want to hurt them but only realize how cruel they were when they get older and maybe regret it. As a teacher I think you have to be above such things. If you take things like this to heart, you probably won't last long in that job.

For Maleeka I thinks it's still hard to cope with it, although she made the decision to refuse to be influenced by it any longer. You're only free to be yourself when you don't care any longer about what others think or say about you. And, ironically, only then they usually start to like you.


And another grammar goodie:

"The new teacher don't know when to quit."

Sunday, November 8, 2009

Chapter 1

The first thing I want to talk about here is - because it was the first thing I noticed and really freaked me out - the really bad grammar in this book. Ok, I know it's written from a teenage girl's perspective and it's probably some dialect or weird accent, but honestly, writing like this? I think it would be ok if this was only in direct speech, but until now it seems as if the whole book is written like this. It might also be ok for native speakers, but for second language acquisition it might be confusing. But apart from that, it just freaks me out :D Especially the sentence

"Last year, when I thought things couldn't get no worse, he came up with this here song."

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