Trees

Right now I'm cleaning my old room in Baton Rouge. Growing up, I believed everything was valuable, everything from my (retarded) drawings as a child to my 6th grade social studies grades. However, now being a little less sentimental, I'm weeding through my old school work and keeping notes (math, history, english, grammar) that I know I'll probably use in the future.

What struck me as shocking was how much paper my high school wasted. After a semester at UNO where strict budget cuts forced faculty to be thrifty on paper, I find myself going through packet after packet of articles my teachers printed out for us at CHS. My favorite has to be my World History AP binders -- that's right, plural! Almost always I could go through an entire school year with one binder per subject, sometimes one binder per two subjects. However, my World History AP teacher printed out vast amounts of information for us to stuff into our brains, causing me to haul two binders filled to the brim every day. Oh yeah, and I was one of fifteen in the class. Imagine how much paper we would've saved if she had just emailed us the articles like a college professor.

Ironically, in going through my 8th grade notes, I came upon an old poem. One day during English class, workers were trying to cut down the trees outside our windows. The noise was so disrupting that my teacher decided to not teach. Instead, she asked us to write a poem about the tree so we'd still be productive. Here was my poem (bad grammar and all):

THE FALL OF JIM

There was a tree who's name was Jim,
50 years ago we planted him.
Decades past, we've forgotten him,
and now there's only in our minds a dim
past with Jim.

Diseased, yes it be,
to the principal the message came to, you see
Thinking a wee bit, he said, "Gee,
what could we do with thee?"

Mobbing Jim with a chainsaw,
my language arts class awed and guffawed.
They slowly nitch the trunk,
and leave it to go "thump!"

(at least not on the Junior High building!)

THE END

... Did I seriously use "thee" in 8th grade?