Thursday, Apr. 01, 2004
I still think our rotation might be better than the Orioles'. Definitely than the Tigers'., posted at 8:38 a.m.
Epiphany in Baltimore has moved to epiphanyinbaltimore.blogspot.com It's raining cats and dogs out there today. I'm not sure we'll be able to have practice. To update you on the team, we are now 0-3. Ugh. I really thought we had a good team when we started the season, that this was the year when all of our players had matured enough to do very well. And I think our team is solid. Unfortunately, we have no pitching at all. Pitching is killing us. If we can develop a pitcher or two, we'll be okay. Otherwise, we're going to be in trouble.I got in the house fairly early last night and ended up catching up on work. Much needed. My 13-hour days at school have yielded not much time for any work at all. I was going to go to the gym, but Bill convinced me to stay in and rent a movie. Since I had Seabiscuit on my shelf and had never seen it, we put that in. We only made it through about twenty minutes of it. It was so cheesy, and I just wasn't in the mood for a cheesy movie. I ended up putting in Notorious C.H.O. and laughing a bit while grading vocabulary quizzes. I then went to bed early with my copy of The Outsiders, which I am considering a proposal for to add to the ninth grade curriculum.
We're having a very interesting debate right now within our department about young adult novels and their place, if any, in our curriculum. I'm all about YA literature, but I'm unsure about The Outsiders. It's all about our course theme - coming of age in an unjust society - but I really cannot get into it. I don't have a problem with the plot or the characters yet, even if it is a little Party of Five-ish, but the dialogue is leaden. I keep reading it, and I'm amazed that it's not the narrator's voice in his head, but rather dialogue actually spoken aloud by a character. It's really terrible. It's been a while since I was into YA literature - I had a course that I loved in college towards the end - but I don't remember it being this different from quote-unquote "adult" literature.
Anybody have any suggestions for a novel - YA or not - surrounding the "Coming of Age in an Unjust Society" theme? I'd love on that's not a first person narrator, but that's not a requirement. It has to be one that is for summer reading. Other core texts are To Kill a Mockingbird, Romeo and Juliet, A Lesson Before Dying, and probably In the Time of Butterflies.
Spring break is one day away. I can't go anywhere or do anything except catch up on stuff. I have major spring cleaning to do. I want to do some gardening. Some major working out and running. Find my cell phone.