Luna Kirby is one of two people who have entered into a Creative Odyssey. His art entry, The Marionette, is an entry of emotion and meaning. Luna is in ninth grade this year. He is one of Fall River’s day-brightening kids. When he entered the room, he had his hair tied back, which he often does when he’s trying to focus. This makes sense, seeing as how Luna has just come from math. Luna wasn’t wearing many beads on this Wednesday, but usually he wears enough Kandi-styled beads to cause serious bead envy but still bring joy to the viewer. He seemed tired but interested in answering questions. 

I was very curious about this. Has Luna ever experienced a time in his life when he felt the loss of control that this clown is experiencing, in his life? “Well, yeah. All the time. Just as a teenager in general, I don’t really have much freedom for myself. I just don’t get to go and do whatever I want.” Luna went deeper: “I get upset… frustrated at a lot of things. Mostly because, half the time I don’t understand why I was being told I can’t.” Luna is an artist, and artists sometimes forget the reality of being a teen. Sometimes, artists need to ground themselves back to reality when they are in a creative rush of getting as much materials or ideas as quickly as they can. When artists get told they can’t, they become a storm of raging baboons. Luna seems to have experienced this storm many times in his life.

Luna said that he spent roughly around two days painting The Marionette. He said that he started the process and then stopped doing it for about a week, and then started painting again. I’m not too sure that he was certain himself, but he said that was how it mostly went. Luna seemed to have a loose conception of time. He is so focused on his art pieces, painting and beading, that he loses track of the reality of time. For Luna, time is his own puppet master, controlling what he does by each tick of the second, forcing him to age or go places. “If you’re a kid, you’re just gonna have to tough it out. Try your hardest to stay in control over what you can.” Sometimes parents put a leash on a kid, like in Disneyland, but every kid must tug that leash until it snaps.

This painting may not be perfect; but it allowed us to see a part of Luna that a lot of people might miss. Luna has the ability to see this painting as more than just a sad, traumatized clown. He let us see it as a part of his own life, and what we could be missing when we look at art. So as he started to leave from Mr. Howes’s band of hyena reporters, Luna looked confident about what he had answered to my questions.

The 7th to 8th grade Journalism class is a place of despair. Or at least for Mr. Howes (Nurse Ratched). From our point of view, this is just a comfortable place to write about the news at the school. From Mr. Howes’s point of view, we are just a bunch of dangerous patients that are out of our straight jackets. From obsessive duck syndrome, to grandma forgetting her schizophrenia medication, we are a peeled bunch of bananas.  

First, let me introduce you to Obsessive Duck Syndrome Girl. She is the new girl in this class. She had to switch over to our class after burning down multiple restaurants that serve duck. She loves taking the feathers of pillows and putting them back on the ducks. We have to stay away from her sometimes because she goes on a duck rampage.

Secondly… we have Turtle Girl. She loves going to the depths of the Hawaiian waters and hugging turtles. She brings turtles to the surface to teach them their ABCs. She had an incident with her sister. She bit her sister because they fought over one handsome looking turtle. We keep trying to keep her in our lightly used straight jacket.

Next, we have Friday The 13th. She is one of our rather interesting characters. She loves talking about rat tendons. She has the belief that mustard can go on alarm clocks. We have to keep her away from the mental patients sometimes because she makes them lose their spinal fluids. Make sure to keep your children away from her.

Then we have Rora. She goes through a midlife crisis sometimes. She needs to take her dementia medication (she lost it). When we make our stories, Rora forgets to take a picture or remember the score of the games we sometimes allow our patients to go to. We give her medicine in a piece of cheese.

Fifth, we have our toughest patient… Gangster. She has some things that we  can’t talk about at this moment. I’ll just let you know that Gangster has the toughest fit known to man. She is so mysterious and has a big brain.

Lastly, we have Grandma. Grandma has lost every marble. She has just a bit of schizophrenia. Sometimes, she attaches rocket boosters to her wheel chair and rams into the wall. Grandma has many ideas that aren’t so bright. She loves talking about Lebron James inside of the sun. She bites us when we give her bagels. She is the feistiest grandma known to man. This is the one reason why we have restraints.

These interesting specimens are all our Journalism and Creative Writers. Including me, PBJ. I have gained this name for a reason I can not name. It apparently stands for Psyco Baby Jaymieson. I have not a clue on why I was bestowed with this wonderful name, but I feel like it fits. So I hope that you all can get a good idea of what this wonderful class is like.

Mr. Wood in the Woods

Mr. Wood is a second-year teacher at Fall River Junior-Senior High. I don’t think many people know a lot about Mr. Wood. Going into the interview, I have some ideas about what to expect. I expect that he will have a dog. I expect that he will be an outdoor enthusiast, taking hikes, sitting in a hammock. I expect that Mr. Wood is a man who likes to read books while drinking a nice warm coffee on his sofa. I expect that Mr. Wood has a very calm and cozy atmosphere in his house. I expect Mr. Wood to be a very whimsical tree man. Let’s find out if I’m right:

I walked up to him in my second period in his English class. It was a very noisy room, as my classmates were working on a group project. The room smelled like mint because of his air humidifier. The first question I asked was, “What inspired you to start teaching?” I asked this because Mr. Wood seems like a kind soul. I also want to know why he wanted to be a teacher, of all professions: “I’m a fourth generation teacher, so I kinda know the struggle that you’re getting into. One of the things I particularly like about teaching, compared to some other jobs, is that I don’t have to follow the profit motive.” This information was interesting to me because I expected him to say that he was inspired by an adult in his childhood. Mr. Wood remained insistent that he doesn’t care about money, and he really wants to help kids: “My job is to just kind of help kids become better readers and writers, and be a somewhat positive human being for them. I feel like that is a rare type of opportunity to have in our environment when so many things are driven by profit. So working as a teacher means I don’t really have to hail to the profit motive.” It’s not surprising because teachers don’t go into the profession for the money, but Mr. Wood sounded like a preacher bringing the educational gospel. His answers made me like him even more. 

I wanted to know what environment he was around while he was studying to be a teacher. He went to Butte College and that they were paying him 13,000 dollars just to be at that college. This is attention catching to me because personally: I have never heard of someone being paid to go to a college. I guess it is possible, but it’s still new. Then Mr. Wood switched to Chico State, where he got his Teaching Credential. 

Hobbies? I was correct. Mr. Wood is an outdoor enthusiast hiking like the Tree Man I expected him to be. I expected this because he grew up in a rural part of California, GrassValley, with very beautiful landscapes, a place within an hour’s drive of Auburn, California. I had made an informed guess of his being an outdoorsy man because many people I know who grew up in GrassValley or the Auburn area are people who spend a lot of time outside looking for trees to hug.  Mr. Wood also plays the guitar. I found this out because one day, I jokingly said, “You should let me paint your nails, Mr. Wood.” To which he replied, “No. I have to keep them short because I play the guitar.” What a mystical, reading, hiking, playing guitar, tree man Fall River has found. We are lucky to have a young man interested in the future of the nation more than his wallet.