Essay test questions

Tomorrow is the Big day. Grade 4 kiddies take their end of the year sale unit test. The focus is on reading comprehension, listening and language arts. The speaking opportunity is next week. Everything must go!

It covers the final two chapters - history, time lines, bar graphs, maps, giraffes, gaffs, staffs and laughs.

Language Arts Essay Questions

Instructions. Read the questions. Answer the questions using complete sentences.

1. Why do you think it might be good to know your street address? Please explain.

2. When might you need a map? Can you tell why.

1. It's probably a good idea to know my street address inside the heavily fortified gated community on the old banana plantation because that's where older moronic perverse pedantic people take care of me. Actually two of them, the ones who connived me during a lustful interlude ten years ago leave early to make money. They take me shopping on weekends to reduce their abandonment guilt.

The other two - a comedy team from Vegas - do all the heavy lifting: washing, cleaning, cooking and rearranging antimatter. They pack my lucky lunch and tons of textbooks in a rolling suitcase, drive me to school in a black shiny SUV - the place surrounded by bamboo pavilions - and leave me alone to play with my catatonic friends and yell at high decibels.

I love noise and confusion and yelling. It's the only way to get people to pay attention to me!

2. The map is not the territory.

I hope I pass this test. My parents promised me a fantastic new toy if my score is higher than a bird can fly.

Metta.

No lost, no found

What is your motivation?

What is your intention?

What is speaking to you?

I am a Camera.

A patient tiger in the sun, swimming deep waters. I sleep with the tiger.

I am cooling love, love shoved in, chewed, swallowed, digested. A 47 million-year old fossil. An Eagle nebula, swirling cosmic.

Destiny's child. A figment of your imagination speaking of memory.

I am hot red ink inside dust unloading cans of paint for a project to to abandoned,

Wearing a burgundy shawl from Lhasa, before the Chinese invaded with

Patriotic re-education pogroms, programs and propaganda machines.

I smell like clean laundry’s spring dance.

where people don’t listen

don’t really listen

don’t really care

sleeping with their eyes wide

open

struggling with anxiety

swallowing daily happy pills

by the by

hand me down my walking stick

Metta.

Camping 101

Grade 4 kids, all 89.5 recently went "camping" on a teamwork development life skills program for two nights and three daze.

As in participating in a tightly controlled, scripted program under the direct, immediate supervision of 10 teachers armed with cell phones; watchers and minders. No parents, drivers or maids to do ALL the simple daily work.

Here are the highlights. No one died.

a) a four-hour walk through villages, planting rice in mud, harvesting yams, identifying trees, plants and feeling the reality of heat, mud, water, and narrow wet slippery trails under a broiling sun.

b) how to put up and take down a tent.

c) how to tie a variety of knots and use a compass.

d) how to prepare basic, simple cooking materials and deep fry delicious foods like banana pancakes, tempe, and tofu over a smelly kerosene stove without suffering 3rd degree burns from hot bubbling oil.

e) coping, surviving, laughing, screaming teamwork perspectives while crawling up a steep muddy wet obstacle course and staying connected to the person in front of them.

f) some even learned how to develop a greater sense of independence and teamwork attitudes.

How to accept personal responsibility versus being lazy and avoiding responsibility; a deeply ingrained cultural attitude.

All the meals were catered. Trucked in from a nearby restaurant. A real struggle.

As one of many little campers standing in line with a pile of fried rice on their plastic cartoon plate, said, "I WANT MORE!"

"Don't be greedy. Next."  

Some people are never satisfied with what little they have. So it goes.

Metta.

Burad Badeed (sea bandit)

Dear Sea Bandits, burad badeed in Somali.

We are gathered here today to discuss our plans, options and future. Our ancestors, the great, magnificent, wise, and amazing visionaries were blessed with the ability to see and write the future.

They came from the vast deep interior. Wind swept dunes on shifting grains of sand. Time and water and boredom was their destiny. Their vision extended past mud, water, sand, gravel and volcanic sediment. They reached the churning violent sea of foaming blue. They fished. They repaired nets and roasted camel meat on open fires brimming with stars.

Sea became home. They worshiped currents.

Then, one day, large space ships invaded their coastal domain names, tribal connections, village dialects, identities, and simple way of life. The space ships plundered deep long and wide, cutting a swath of exploratory hatcheries.

Tuna, blue marlin, sharks, sardines, turtles, goldfish, squid, salmon, trout, octopus, sea snails, whales, manta rays and millions of minnows named Nemo departed their aqualung existence destined for plates and bowls of greedy capitalistic eaters.

Our children, wives, and families went hungry. They ate desert dust and deserted dreams.

Our council elders gathered. "We have lost of way of life. We are suffering. We need new delicious decisions and directions."

"Yes," agreed the young and restless. "Let's take to the high seas and become pirates and bandits and heroes. We will save the human race from extinction, from the space ships. We will intercept and board foreign vessels. We will hold the crew and cargo hostage. We will demand huge sums of cash."

"Cash is King! Long live the King!"

They sailed forth on their quest for adventure and booty led by Captain Hook and his merry band of pranksters.

"Ahoy mates and a bottle of rum, ho-ho heave ho here we go." They sailed into eternity's sunset.

Metta.

Transient species

Yes, we, meaning you and I and a billion other H. Saps are all in transit on a spinning rock. Can Earth take care of itself? How does it continually renew itself against the onslaught of too many humans?

How does this process of natural Hobbit reality survive? Wit, guile, cunning, compassion, kindness, love, flash drives and tremors well below the surface of our best intentions. Natural selection. Survival of the fittest, fastest, fashionable.

Self interest and greed=happiness.

Such a mysterious puzzle.

When I am asleep I am awake.

Metta.