Table of contents for Journal Project
I teach Rhetoric 2 to sophomores at Logos School here in Moscow, Idaho, and every year around this time, I assign the (now famous) Journal Project. The Journal Project consists of 30 days of journal entries on the same topic. The students are given one day off each week, so we complete the Journal Project over the course of five weeks (writing six days each week). Only this year my students asked me to do the Journal Project with them. So here we go… My topic is my family.
Day 2
My oldest descendant I am told looks a great deal like me. Though I’m fairly sure that he is already bigger than I was at his age, he’s doing the blonde hair/blue eye thing quite proficiently. I’ve also noticed several other qualities we share in common as father and son: The ability to turn everything into an imaginary World War 3 through finely tuned explosive sounds and the deeply held conviction that there is a sleeping Ninja in everyone of us just waiting to be awakened. We also share the trait of cheerful, completely baseless confidence. After his first piano lesson, he announced that he could now play the piano, and his teacher was — in his words, “OK.”
I can remember believing that I was about ready to turn pro on my second-hand Schwinn when I was 7 after a particularly sweet spin around my house in California. And a year or two later, I was pretty sure there were pro scouts in the bushes just waiting to pounce on me and my banana board. Though in retrospect, I’m pretty sure that most of my confidence came through well-timed sound effects.
Come to think of it, my internal sound track and sound maker were probably my greatest assets. If I had used sound effects more on my spelling tests, I probably wouldn’t have driven my mother so crazy. I will need to share this bit of wisdom with my son sometime soon. I will also explain to his teachers that this is an inherited family defect. We can only concentrate when there are explosion noises sputtering out of our mouths along with the beat-box echoes of Ninja punches and kicks. It’s true that the downside to this is spraying the homework with spittle, but, Mrs. Kimmell, some people are just born this way. But you can be sure that I will instruct my son in no uncertain terms to wipe his paper dry before turning it in. We may be slightly disabled, but we are still civilized.
Charles Chambers says
Good writing Toby. Can almost hear those sounds as I read. And, of course, I’ll be taking a shower later this morning to deal with the result of the Ninja sounds. As for a boy by the name of River producing a little extra foam, well….
Love you guys.