Rumpus Original Fiction: Poor People Disappear
Nothing is not right. There is no indication there has ever been a house.
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Join NOW!Nothing is not right. There is no indication there has ever been a house.
...moreThere are no line breaks here because there are no breaks here.
...more“You’re headed for victory.”
...moreAll the cruelty of the past seasons washed away with the new layer of snow. I thought your streak was over. I thought we could be friends.
...moreThere isn’t even a discussion. There aren’t any words. You just start swinging—the building is a fence, your cousins are a fence. The two of you are surrounded. There’s no escape for either of you.
...moreAuthor Nina Stibbe discusses her new novel Paradise Lodge, our obsession with character likeability, and how she more than flirts with feminism.
...moreA first day means there was a never-day.
...more…one day she offered me an even better, bigger bribe: If I mastered all my writing skills and got up to speed on my classwork, I could write a play, which would be performed at school. For BuzzFeed Books, Charlie Jane Anders recalls how her Special Ed teacher made her the writer she is today.
...moreWhen you arrived, you reached under the mat to pick up the keys in an envelope. Inside, a note on the kitchen counter said help yourself to anything in the pantry or fridge.
...moreThe proof of their friendship came through years of devotion.
...morePerhaps the city looked more poignantly lovely because I was conscious of its tragic history.
...more“That’s the anthem I would have sung at my original graduation if the university had stayed open,” my mother said.
...moreStudents who read four to six books in a summer are more likely to maintain their reading skills between semesters. As a result, many schools develop summer reading programs to help stave off the inevitable intellectual decline students face during the summer months. However, assigning books to students might be less effective than allowing them to choose. […]
...moreIn most communities, teachers are compensated so poorly and afforded so little respect that in many cases the primary compensation is martyrdom.
...moreIt’s no surprise from how the Bronte sisters wrote about school in their novels that their school reports would be less than exemplary. Still, to read Charlotte Bronte’s school report that describes her as an indifferent writer who knows little of grammar is pretty hilarious.
...more…over the past 40 years, despite endless debates about curricula, testing, teacher training, teachers’ salaries, and performance standards…there has been no improvement—none—in the academic proficiency of American high school students. Also, “American high schools are even more boring than schools in nearly every other country.” Read more depressing facts about American high schools at Slate.
...moreIn Meridian, when schools want to discipline children, they do much more than just send them to the principal’s office. They call the police, who show up to arrest children who are as young as 10 years old. Arrests, the Department of Justice says, happen automatically, regardless of whether the police officer knows exactly what […]
...moreGawker reports on a high-school in Germany that has put a moratorium on homework for younger students in response to the state’s new policy keeping students in school 44 hours per week.
...moreIs there any group of people on the planet more eagle-eyed than eighth graders? I think not
...moreI just learned from Jacket Copy that “Menifee school district in Riverside County has removed the 10th edition of the Merriam-Webster Dictionary from all school shelves after a parent complained about a student running across “oral sex” in its pages.” It’s thanks to dirty dictionaries like that one that I decided to become a writer.
...more1. Saturday night party/silent auction for a school. Daniel Kim was there, looking around. My husband goes, “Hey, are you lost?” 2. One of the items up for bid was to be the headmaster for a day. In the program this was most unfortunately titled, “Head For a Day.” When this is presented to a table […]
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