Learnin' with Mr. Peanutbutter, Thursday, period 1

[hollywoostar]

"Oh captain, my captain!" Mr. Peanutbutter howled when the old fashioned school bell rang to start the class. Yes, actually quite literally howled. "Oh! Captain! My! Captain! This is the beginning of a very famous poem! You know it's very famous because it was used as a central theme in a very famous movie. Which just goes to show you: poetry, while seemingly silly and completely inconsequential, can actually have a big impact on society." He shrugged. "Or, well, it used to. That movie's pretty old. And the only lines from that poem I know are 'oh captain, my captain'. But it really probably isn't super important."

Mr. Peanutbutter pulled his chair around to the front of his desk and sat on it backwards (he'd been practicing -- it turned out it worked best when you had a chair without any arms on it!), leaning his forearms on the top.

"So let's talk about poetry today. As an adult with a successful career, a large house, and a beautiful wife, I have very little need for poetry in my life. But as teenagers, full of confusing hormones, looking forward at a ruined economy with nothing to show you what your future will look like but wildly popular dystopic YA fiction, poetry might mean a great deal to you. Perhaps you have a little journal you keep in your room where you write down all of your greatest worries in awkward meter. Maybe you wander around campus in between classes trying to find that eternally elusive rhyme for 'orange'. Poetry can be a great escape for the disaffected teenager, apparently. I don't really know; I was really popular as a child and everyone in my hometown looked and behaved exactly like I did. But this class isn't about me. It's about all of you."

He nodded empathetically at the students for a long, awkward moment, then stood up and went to the chalkboard.

That's right, not a whiteboard, an actual, old school, salt-of-the-earth, covered-in-still-vaguely-legible-'erased'-words-and-math-formulas chalkboard. We're not real sure where he got it.

"So what do we know about poetry? Well, first off, it rhymes." He wrote "rhymes" on the board. "Also, it does something I've heard referred to as 'scanning'." He added "scans". "I don't know what that is, but it seems to be important. And lastly, it's expressive." "Expresses" went up on the board, and the whole list -- of three things -- was underlined. "And for some reason, they're not songs, even though songs are clearly more fun. That's -- I think that's everything? Sure! Okay. So we're going to write poetry today! About something we really care about, like -- balls! Let's write poems about balls. I'm going to say it should be at leeeeeeeeeeeast . . . four lines. That rhyme. About balls. Take . . . twenty minutes." He tapped his piece of chalk against the base of his chin, leaving a little dusty streak in his fur, then nodded. "And then read them out loud!" Who needed lesson planning when you could make an assignment up on the fly?

"Oh, and just to let you know, I did not receive any notes from the producers about last week's episode. So let's keep up that good work! And Faith -- don't think I forgot about your homework assignment! I want to hear all about your five mile run last week. Now -- get poetring! Poetric? Poemish. Write poems!"

Criminal Justice & You, Thursday, Second Period

[10secondcar]

"Hey, guys!" Brian greeted his students. If he looked kind of haggard, that was because he had spent a lot of last night trying to clean all the cat hair from what was apparently his apartment now, only to give up and fall asleep on the bare mattress (because of course he didn't have sheets for the bed) and be woken by the cat Wash had apparently left behind, presumably to torment Brian, walking across his face at 2 AM. He'd had to feed it the can of tuna he found in the back of one of the cabinets to get it to shut up and let him go back to sleep. So he guessed he had a cat now. He was thinking of calling it Vince; it was almost as annoying. "First off, really sorry about last week. Something...something came up. But I'm here now, so let's get started, yeah? In case you're wondering why I'm qualified to teach this class: I used to be a cop out in LA, but that, uh, that didn't work out. And now I teach here!" Yeah, he was leaving a lot out of this scintillating tale. "I bet you thought you were done with introductions, but spoiler alert, you're not: gimme your name, where you're from, and an interaction you've had with law enforcement in the past. If you've managed to avoid that so far, tell me something about law enforcement in your universe--those of you who have encountered the law can tell me about how things work in your universe, too, if you want."

Ethics, Thursday

[saddeserthermit]

Today the classroom's desks were shoved to the sides of the room and a white tape was going down the middle. Anakin and Obi-Wan were standing on it. "Today we're going to explore how assumptions we make about how we interact with the world might not be universal," Anakin began.

"This is a class we teach every year," Obi-Wan said, "In an effort to communicate the principle of privilege. Privilege is a complicated concept, which touches each of us in different ways: depending on which planet we are on and what era it is, simple things such as skin tone, education, wealth, ethnicity and so on may make our lives harder or easier. One may experience privilege for one element of one's self, and lose it for another. And so forth."

Anakin nodded. "Since Fandom covers the gamut of space and time," and has a statistically unusual number of orphans, "it's very difficult to get a group of questions that accurately reflect the challenges and the privileges in your life. I would ask that you answer as honestly as you can. Master Kenobi and I, as always, will participate as well. Though we both became Jedi, which is a group of privilege in our galaxy, we grew up quite differently."

"If you are uncomfortable with the assignment, you are allowed to sit it out," Obi-Wan continued. "Please tell us if this is the case."

"Everyone else, stand on the line, please," Anakin said.