Buzzword

Sometimes I'm amused and puzzled when the same word crops up in a large percentage of the class's writing for a day. This week I've graded the twelfth grade's excellent first round of Paper 2's in which they compare two works of the same genre (drama, for us) and how they treat some theme or convention (jealousy and envy this time); the same students wrote about the sense they get of the court at Malfi in Webster's Duchess of Malfi. I've also graded the eleventh graders' analysis of the final scene of part I of Things Fall Apart, in which a tribesman starts to question the laws and traditions which govern his community.

Well, the word of the week is gloomy. There's a gloomy atmosphere; jealousy and envy are gloomy themes, and the feeling of the court in the Duchess of Malfi is deceptive and gloomy. In some cases this is true, and supported with evidence, in some cases it is entirely unfounded. I'm trying to remember if I said gloomy at some point, or if another students said gloomy, or if it ever appeared on the board... maybe it was simply making the rounds of Facebook. Anyway, I hope they get the gloom out of their systems now so we can move on to more accurate descriptions of our current texts.

They can whip out gloomy again when we get to Arthur Miller in January.