1. I’ve introduced my seventh graders to Sabaton, with satisfactory results. As in, after the first day they asked for a song every class. Now that we’re done with World War One, they’ll have to wait until World War Two.

2. Seventh graders also got introduced to Ray Bradbury via A Sound of Thunder, which they seemed to enjoy.

One of the points I emphasized for that story is how none of the characters show proper respect for the dangers facing them. Eckels has no idea what he’s getting into trying to hunt a tyrannosaurus rex (the old-school kind that was more movie monster than mere beast, because Bradbury understood these things), but in the same way the safari company doesn’t show proper respect for the dangers of time travel. They know that they could potentially alter history or even wipe out the human race by accident, but they keep doing it anyway because it’s profitable, throwing up a flimsy defence of warnings and fines. Like most great science fiction stories, it’s a tale of hubris being punished by nature.

3. The story of Edward Norton, AKA Norton I, Emperor of the United States and Protector of Mexico is the sort to make one wish to be a little more mad.

4. Modern people like to say things like, “If fairies were real, there would be photographs or other scientific evidence of them.”

I have to imagine the fairies find that sort of comment amusing. Assuming they think of it at all.

5. One of the requirements of a good adaptation is not just to accurately depict the story, but to utilize the new medium to add to the original story. You can do things in a film, for instance, that you can’t do in a book, and things in a book that you can’t do in a film. Moving a story from a book to a film requires doing things that aren’t in the book. A good adaptation knows how to replace what it can’t do with what it can do in order to tell the same story in a different way.

6. Preparing to teach my 7th graders how to read Shakespeare (that is to say, preparing to pretend that I actually know how to do so with better than about a 75% success rate), I’ve put together a ‘Shakespeare Cheat-Sheet’ of some basic linguistic ideas. These are things like how ‘thou/thee’ works, basics of social rank, and so on. One of the things I found was the fact that Shakespearean langue has a lot of contractions; far more than modern English. It seems to have been the norm to cut any syllable from any word (more or less), as long as you r’place it with an apostrophe.

This is a rule I wish would come back, especially as a replacement to the obnoxious trend of shortening every word.

7. Here’s a key question to ask regarding every political position: “Apart from theoretically winning votes, why would the ruling classes want this to happen?”