I discovered this on Wikipedia today or yesterday… I can’t remember how.
On September 15, 1595, a group of pupils of Edinburgh High School barricade themselves in because of a dispute about holidays. When adults break in, pupil William Sinclair shoots city bailie John McMorane dead. The boys were arrested but acquitted later.
Um… proof violent video games aren’t the sole cause of school shootings? They were even acquitted!
Yeah, tangential. Whatever.
I think I absolutely killed Extension English today. Not by shooting, but still. Felt very good about the whole thing. My creative was an inversion of a story I’d previously written for an exam (this was the closest I think I’ve ever gone to repeating myself in what I write for an exam), which was based on Robert Browning’s poem The Laboratory (go ahead, click, it’s very readable). The last version was an extrapolation of the persona’s experience (extending to her murder of two women), whilst this is a journal entry from a remorseful apothecary.
He knows from the persona’s monologue her intent is to kill two women for her husband’s [alleged] indiscretions, yet is compelled by her imperative to “take all my jewels, gorge gold to your fill”. Afterwards, he is overcome with guilt and fancies he could kill himself with a drop of poison dissolved in his wine, which he takes and swills around until the colloid is no longer visible, dissolved in the glass… but he does not wish to take another life, to put another mark against his already-damned conscience. So he pours the wine back into the bottle, with some care, and replaces the cork, returning it to the darkened cellar. Thus, he will die by poison and not at his own hand, seemingly freed from the damnation of suicide, absolved from his crimes — and he must die because he is London’s last apothecary of this kind [that is, the malevolent!], bringing death unjustly and remaining beyond reproach, the crime of poisoning enacted by other agents.
I’m a little annoyed we don’t get the papers back, actually, but oh well. I didn’t particularly care about English Advanced, but I was actually quite impressed with my efforts for this one! Modern, on the other hand, will be rather the opposite… so I must go and study. Or try to. Cram.
1595.…. did they even have guns back then??? I suppose they had crossbows.….
Very well done for English, especially considering that you needed a scribe.
Hehe, thanks, but… uhh, about the scribe… I had one there but didn’t use them, because I CANNOT THINK whilst trying to dictate to a scribe!! Far out. I tried on the weekend with parentals, and discovered that I literally struggle to complete a [normal] sentence when dictating like that, with my overall sentence complexity falling dramatically. When Henry James began using a scribe to dictate his writings, the effect was quite the opposite: his sentences got longer and meandered — often rather painfully, unless you appreciate that sort of thing… I should, given my own writing style, but often fail to.
All that can conclusively be said to mean is that he was a windbag who would pause for people to dictate his thoughts and could adequately store his ideas, whilst I cannot. I am simply a more impatient windbag.
Hmmm you could try getting your papers back under freedom of information laws, apparently it’s worked before but the BOS stopped doing it after the two people who got their papers back were able to see the crazy grading they used. Worth a try?
Yeah I remember that… no, not worth a try :P Well, worth a try, but not as much effort as that would require ;-) Thanks for the hint tho!