Ok, this may belong in the jokes place, but this is actually not a joke, just hilarious. At least I think so, but some people may be a little shocked. I volunteered to grade these papers for this competition called "Do the Write Thing" Basically, this nonprof gets 8th graders all over the states to write essays that answer 3 questions.
1. How has violence affected my life?
2. What are the causes of violence?
3. What can I do about violence?
Many of you won't be surprised to hear that the vast majority of the essays are written at about a 3rd grade level. The worst thing is that they were graded by their English teacher and most of the mistakes were overlooked. I guess it's hard as a teacher to tell 90% of your class that they need to completely rewrite their whole essay. I graded a batch from a poorer school in Austin, but by national standards I'm sure they are lower middle class. So, as if that wasn't depressing enough, many of the stories involved startling domestic violence and some actually brought tears to my eyes.
I really don't know what to do abou that, except write comments on their grading sheets like "startling domestic violence" and hope their teacher doesn't have her head completely up her ass.
Anyway, on to the funny part. I came across this one gem of a paper. I have copied it here verbatim, so any typos or grammatical errors are not mine. By the way, this was actually one of the best as far as grammar, punctuation, and sentence structure go. Please try and see the humor in this. It helps to forget that it's real.
There are a lot of types of causes of violence. There are different types of abuse, There’s domestic violence and there’s sexual harassment. There are also a lot of causes of violence. Two of the most causes are alcohol and drugs such as marijuana and cocaine. Most people fight over money and they also fight over females.
I my self have had a lot of encounters with violence in my life but none have been as cool as when my brother whooped my next door neighbor. It was New Years Eve and we were having a new years party. It got started when our neighbors got drunk and started talking mess, and started throwing all kind of stuff in our yard and saying “You gonna do something bout it or not.” That’s when my brother got all pissed and stuff and he said, “Lets go then cake we could swing right here if you want.” Then ole boy ran up on my brother and swung but he missed and my brother just started leaning on that boy. After a while my mom and my aunt started to break it up. Ever since then my neighbors never talk to us any more, and I can see why since my brother that boy.
This really infected my life in a weird way cause now I know that my brother got some major hands. It also showed me that my brother isn’t scared of no one. Main I was happy I was all happy and stuff and I was jumping up and down and stuff. Now that some time has passed I learned that it is good to know how to fight cause you never know when people going to try to run up or something. After he fought I asked him to teach me how to fight better. Others reacted the same way I did they were like man you whooped that boy. Now that some more time has passed I think that I should have jumped in just for the fun of it. I also think that at any time I can drop someone like he did.
My comments on his scoring sheet: This essay blatantly supports violence. The writer is encouraged by violence to learn to fight, not to help end it.
I laughed my ass off, but I had to give it the lowest score possible because he obviously doesn't answer the questions.
By the way....After deliberating, we have decided by general consensus that "cake" means whitey.
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