My wife is a secondary English and Drama teacher. Last week she set her year nine class a creative writing task entitled 'The banning of television - how it changed my life'. She was a little disapointed by the responses she received (most tended to be a little overly dramatic) and asked if I could write a response that she could use as an example. The stimulus (italicised), and my response, are below. Would I make a good Year Nine student?
'You go home tonight, wake up tomorrow and turn on the television to watch a few cartoons before school. When you turn on the T.V. there is no picture. You're annoyed, but you don't think anything of it. You head off to school and see the newspaper banners saying, "Television banned forever."You get to school and everyone's talking about it - at midnight last night, the Federal Government closed down all Australian television stations and banned television broadcasts of all varieties, forever. The Government says "television is a social evil, consuming the minds of citizens and re-programming their brains into passive receivers of information." As an act of humanitarianism, television has been abolished.'I was still a bit confused when I got home from school. I dropped my bag on the floor and sat on the couch. Sensing that not all was well, Sammy sidled up to me and placed her snout on my knee. I scratched the top of her head absentmindedly. ‘Not all television was bad’ I thought. 'I wouldn’t have called it a social evil.’ My hand automatically moved from Sammy’s head to the television remote sitting on the coffee table. Pointing it at the silent television I pressed the red button.
Static.
I changed channel.
More static. White flurries whirled in a senseless storm of noise.
I turned the television off. The screen went black.
Sammy followed me as I walked to the window. In the street some young kids were playing cricket. A mother pushing a pram was talking to an old woman. “Passive receivers,” I whispered to myself. Sammy looked up at me and emitted a low groan. “Ah, it’s alright for you,” I said, “You’ll probably get more attention now.”
At dinner we all sat around the table. Silence. I could tell that mum was happy to be rid of the television. But I’m sure there were things she wanted to watch too. Maybe it served her right – she was always telling me what I couldn’t watch and now the government had told her, along with everyone else, that they couldn’t watch anything.
“What gives them the right?” murmured Dad as he pushed carrots across his plate.
“I think it’ll be good for us,” suggested mum, “as a family.”
“I suppose,” replied Dad. “It’s just that no one asked us what we thought. They just told us what to do.”
“If they had asked us we would have said no,” I commented, not looking him in the face.
After dinner I sat on the couch and looked at the newspaper. On page eleven there was a photograph of a young boy being held in his mother’s arms. Soldiers were pushing her from behind. She was screaming. He was covered in dust.
‘Not everyone gets what they want,’ I thought.
Life plods on post-thesis. I've got heaps of work going - which I'm happy about, don't get me wrong! - but it feels like I'm on a bit of treadmill (and not in the fun OK Go sense). As soon as I've got the prep done for one class I'm on to the next. What ever happened to the idea of churning out a couple of journal articles??
