Pine-Fresh Schmaltz - Two Scenes from the Classroom

on tuesday, my students had a work day for their writing assignments. the assignment dealt with emulating poe's writings, and i encouraged them to get descriptive. at one point, one of my girls looked up and said, "miss g? what does pine smell like?" to which most of the class groaned or fired off a "are you kidding me?" after some questioning i learned that she's really not the outdoors type and stays inside as much as possible. apparently this means never setting foot near potpourri or a pine-scented candle, but i digress. and even though fellow students tried to help her, the best they could really do is say, "it smells like pine! like… green. and plants. and stuff…" which was, needless to say, not entirely helpful. so i did the best thing i could think of: i sent her outside to the back of the school to smell a pine tree. it worked – she came back in with a good description of the smell, but i'm glad no administrator saw her… i would hate to have to explain why one of my students was outside during class sniffing plant life…

today, after turning in an assignment, i had my students work on a few exercises dealing with formal and informal language (because i'm really tired of reading the text messages that pass for assignments from them). unfortunately, whoever wrote our "english workshop" books were a bit out of touch. they were written in 1995; this is the year i graduated high school, and i assure you, never in my high school career did i use the phrases "bogus bash," "outta sight," "groovy tunes," or "skidoo." (well, i might have, but if i did, i'm sure my tongue was firmly planted in my cheek.) one of the sentences they had to rewrite read, "at the wedding, all they played was this schmaltzy music." a first-period student asked me what schmaltzy meant, so i explained it was like cheesy, but that's informal, too. he nodded and asked me if "displeasing" would work. i said sure. a few minutes later the bell rang and our in-between-classes-music started. today it was "come friday" and "too much fun", horrible country songs that played in an endless loop between every class. my student looked at me, gestured up at the speakers and said, "this is schmaltzy music, miss." indeed. way to use that new vocabulary word…