Ending a Fourteen Hour Day With a Classic Perspectives Essay & Starting the Day Anew

Since 1999 (yes, I was partying like it was that year), I've been doing the same perspective activity with students and teachers, which involves smashing an egg and writing from the perspective of a character (a mother hen, a chef, a journalist, a politician, a brother, a 3rd world child, etc.) on what was seen in the genre I give (e.g., letter, memoir, op-ed, journal entry, email). One of the characters I give is musician who turns life's event into music. I offer this activity to teach literary analysis, but also perspective.

Peter, a 1st year graduate student studying to be an English teacher, picked the musician's perspective and in ten minutes tapped his love for Tom Petty and parodies his "Free Falling" song.

She's a bad egg, filled with life's yolk/ could have been made into breakfast for two/ She's a bad egg/ now a pile of shells/ Yellow yolk drips, when dried like its glue.

It's a long fall, dropping from Bryan/ There was no chance / it was going to stay whole / And it's a bad egg, cause I think I can smell it/ It's a bad egg for exploding on the floor.

The egg's free / free falling/ Yeah it's free/ free falling. 

I'm trying something new this semester, too, bringing high school students into my graduate courses so they, too, can participate in literacy events and bring youth viewpoints to the instruction that works and doesn't work. Why this hasn't occurred to be before is absurd? Those of us who teach in graduate programs in education should always have youth in our room to remind us what it's all about (and to raise the bar of what they are able to do intellectually.

The graduate students and I read two short stories, too, and I know that our perspectives were made richer because I included young people from Haiti, Bangladesh, Guatamala, and Tanzania. The American youth population is a pastiche of cultural voices that transcend the Western European our traditional classrooms tend to serve. The subject and content is made robust because of the diverse perspectives of these youth - especially in relation to 21st century realities.

Take any event in history: elections, murders, kneeling, banned books, or tv programs, and explode it for the multiple viewpoints the world might have on it and you have diversity of thought. That's what I'm after, and I am made a better thinker because of it.

And I'm free / free falling. RIP Tom Petty.