I came across an old copy of a fictional Texas newspaper. Here is Part 1 of 4.
The Live Oak County Register
The Official School Newspaper of Dime Box,
“The Cow Chip Tossing Capital of Texas”
SCHOOL NEWS FROM AROUND THE STATE
AND ACROSS THE NATION
Volume 1, Issue 1 September 2006
SPELLING BEE “BUZZ”
Reuters, August 31—The Empire State’s yearly spelling bee ended without a champion for the fifth straight year, when 107 contestants all failed to spell the name of their home state correctly. The closest anyone came to winning the coveted Golden Hive trophy was Harvey Pooks, eleven, of Nutley, New Jersey, who took a mere six minutes to spell out “N-E-W-Y-O-U-R-K.” Judges consoled the downcast near-champion with the news that even if he had spelled the name correctly, he would have been disqualified as a result of his New Jersey residency.
Pooks, by the way, nearly won the National Geography Bee when he incorrectly identified his hometown of Nutley as the the 50th state. He was the only Geography Bee contestant to provide an American place name in answer to the question.
FIGHTING WORDS
Gun Barrel City, Sept. 5 — Scandal erupted here at Saint Prospero’s Progressive Middle School when Mrs. Layla Ripley’s eleven-year-old niece, Gretchen, who was correcting her aunt’s ninth grade Social Studies papers, assigned a “D-” to a paper written by Mrs. Sherry Ornish for her daughter, Candace.
Mrs. Ornish was enraged that Gretchen had been so harsh in the grading of her daughter’s paper.
“Why, my cousin Jonquil wrote all my papers throughout high school, and I never received a grade lower than “B,” she told the Register.
On a side note, investigative reporters discovered that another student in Mrs. Ripley’s class, Felix Pratt, used information he found on the Internet without attributing it to the source. Pratt had struck up a scholarly online friendship with Pulitzer Prize-winning author Frank McCourt by masquerading as a first-year philosophy instructor at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor campus. The ninth grader used ideas gleaned from McCourt’s online ruminations about entropy and Limerick’s troubled economic matrix to use in a paper entitled “Ireland: Isle of Saints, Scholars, and Slowly Devolving Systematic Disorder.”
School District administrator Uriah Quackenbush has issued a statement congratulating young Pratt for his initiative and reprimanding the teacher for giving papers to a fifth grader to correct when she has a perfectly capable sixth grader at home.
The Live Oak County Register
The Official School Newspaper of Dime Box,
“The Cow Chip Tossing Capital of Texas”
SCHOOL NEWS FROM AROUND THE STATE
AND ACROSS THE NATION
Volume 1, Issue 1 September 2006
SPELLING BEE “BUZZ”
Reuters, August 31—The Empire State’s yearly spelling bee ended without a champion for the fifth straight year, when 107 contestants all failed to spell the name of their home state correctly. The closest anyone came to winning the coveted Golden Hive trophy was Harvey Pooks, eleven, of Nutley, New Jersey, who took a mere six minutes to spell out “N-E-W-Y-O-U-R-K.” Judges consoled the downcast near-champion with the news that even if he had spelled the name correctly, he would have been disqualified as a result of his New Jersey residency.
Pooks, by the way, nearly won the National Geography Bee when he incorrectly identified his hometown of Nutley as the the 50th state. He was the only Geography Bee contestant to provide an American place name in answer to the question.
FIGHTING WORDS
Gun Barrel City, Sept. 5 — Scandal erupted here at Saint Prospero’s Progressive Middle School when Mrs. Layla Ripley’s eleven-year-old niece, Gretchen, who was correcting her aunt’s ninth grade Social Studies papers, assigned a “D-” to a paper written by Mrs. Sherry Ornish for her daughter, Candace.
Mrs. Ornish was enraged that Gretchen had been so harsh in the grading of her daughter’s paper.
“Why, my cousin Jonquil wrote all my papers throughout high school, and I never received a grade lower than “B,” she told the Register.
On a side note, investigative reporters discovered that another student in Mrs. Ripley’s class, Felix Pratt, used information he found on the Internet without attributing it to the source. Pratt had struck up a scholarly online friendship with Pulitzer Prize-winning author Frank McCourt by masquerading as a first-year philosophy instructor at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor campus. The ninth grader used ideas gleaned from McCourt’s online ruminations about entropy and Limerick’s troubled economic matrix to use in a paper entitled “Ireland: Isle of Saints, Scholars, and Slowly Devolving Systematic Disorder.”
School District administrator Uriah Quackenbush has issued a statement congratulating young Pratt for his initiative and reprimanding the teacher for giving papers to a fifth grader to correct when she has a perfectly capable sixth grader at home.