Narrative Description

Adding Descriptive Language

The Case Against Good and Bad

The Relatives Came by Cynthia Rylant

How to Write Descriptively from TedEd

TedED Lesson

Interesting Beginnings about school:

Simile's in "The Secret Lion"

From "The Secret Lion"

by Alberto Alvaro Rios

I was twelve and in junior high school and something happened that we didn't have a name for, but it was there nonetheless like a lion, and roaring, roaring that way the biggest things do. Everything changed. Just like that. Like the rug, the one that gets pulled—or better, like the tablecloth those magicians pull where the stuff on the table stays the same but the gasp! from the audience makes the staying-the-same part not matter. Like that.

What happened was there were teachers now, not just one teacher, teach-erz, and we felt personally abandoned somehow. When a person had all these teachers now, he didn't get taken care of the same way, even though six was more than one. Arithmetic went out the door when we walked in. And we saw girls now, but they weren't the same girls we used to know because we couldn't talk to them anymore, not the same way we used to, certainly not to Sandy, even though she was my neighbor, too. Not even to her. She just played the piano all the time. And there were words, oh there were words in junior high school, and we wanted to know what they were, and how a person did them—that's what school was supposed to be for. Only, in junior high school, school wasn't school, everything was backwardlike. If you went up to a teacher and said the word to try and find out what it meant you got in trouble for saying it. So we didn't. And we figured it must have been that way about other stuff, too, so we never said anything about anything—we weren't stupid.

Excerpt from Pardon Me, You're Stepping on My Eyeball by Paul Zindel (1983, Harper & Row)

"Marsh" Mellow was 15 years old and hated almost everything about Curtis Lee High School. Sometimes, in class, he'd just lounge at his desk, making lists of the things he hated most. His list for today ran like this: (1) I hate the school cafeteria because the daily special smells like steamed sneakers smothered in sauteed fleas. (2) I hate the boy sitting in front of me because he looks like a duck. (3) I hate the sky because I don't know where it ends. (4) I hate the principal because he caught me dropping a bag of coffee grinds mixed with Limburger cheese on the cheerleader squad. (5) I hate that my father is 3000 miles away and I know he's in trouble. (6) I hate the school psychologist because he looks like the Goodyear Blimp and keeps giving me tests to see how nuts I am. (7) I hate hating.

Excerpt from Speak by Laurie Halse Anderson (1999 Farrar Straus Giroux)

WELCOME TO MERRYWEATHER HIGH

It is my first morning of high school. I have seven new notebooks, a skirt I hate, and a stomachache....

Older students are allowed to roam until the bell, but ninth-graders are herded into the auditorium. We fall into clans: Jocks, Country Clubbers, Idiot Savants, Cheerleaders, Human Waste, Eurotrash, Future Fascists of America, Big Hair Chix, the Marthas, Suffering Artists, Thespians, Goths, Shredders. I am clanless. I wasted the last weeks of August watching bad cartoons. I didn’t go to the mall, the lake, or the pool, or answer the phone. I have entered high school with the wrong hair, the wrong clothes, the wrong attitude. And I don’t have anyone to sit with.

I am Outcast.

Excerpt from Popular: Vintage Wisdom for a Modern Geek by Maya Van Wagenen (2014 Dutton)

MY SCHOOL'S POPULARITY SCALE

(From patricians to plebeians)

10. Volleyball Girls

9. Football Faction

8. Rich Gang Members (including More-Popular Girls Who Dress Seductively)

7. Band Geeks

6. Choir Geeks

5. Goth Art Chicks

4. Less Popular Girls Who Dress Seductively

3. Pregnant Teens (We have two right now, a seventh and an eighth grader.)

2. Computer Geeks (There are hardly any.)

1. Library Nerds (who read constantly and love Japanese comics)

0. The Ignored (sixth graders)

-1. Social Outcasts

-2. Teachers

-3. Substitute Teachers