Caesar’s wife was above suspicion.

[full_metal_ox]

jamoche on gendered classroom assignments:

So mostly what I do here is write fanfic. Much to my surprise, as I never scored very high in creative writing. (I blame the teachers - when we covered Julius Caesar the girls and boys had different assignments. Girls got "what is Caesar's wife thinking during the assassination?" I put "not much, since she wasn't there so she didn't know it was happening". That didn't go over very well, for some reason.)

Context? It’s right there in her profile.

Comments

[archersangel]

creative writing assignments could be such BS.

[adore]

gender and school are, separately and together, such BS.

[krait]

I wonder what the boys' prompt was? Caesar's thoughts, or something else entirely?

[pseudomonas]

Caesar's thoughts: "ouch"

[full_metal_ox]

Consider the thoughts of some bewildered slave who, having had no clue what was about to go down, had just shown up with Caesar’s lunch: “Well, crap. Might as well sneak off and eat this green salad with croutons, oil-and-vinegar dressing, and anchovy sauce; it’d be a shame to let it go to waste.”

[krait]

That random slave: This salad is great! I should start a restaurant and serve it to everyone!

:D

[full_metal_ox]

On the off chance that my observance of this past 15 March might amuse you:

https://full-metal-ox.dreamwidth.org/19526.html

[krait]

Haha, yep, pretty much. "Et tu, Brute?"

Wonder if any of the boys had a similarly, 'well, duh' answer to their assignment.

[jamoche]

Something from Brutus's POV, IIRC.

On reflection, this wasn't a creative writing prompt, because then the teacher would have lots of different stories to actually read. It was a glorified "how well do you understand the play" study question. Although either way, I submit that I correctly understood the question I was given.

[full_metal_ox]

And you committed the unforgivable offense of displaying a readier familiarity with the underlying history than the teacher.

You further compounded that offense by expressing your objection in gender-inappropriate cold hard logic; given the gender division of the assignment, my impression—how accurate is it?—is that the teacher was soliciting an outpouring of anguished Woman Feels.

[jamoche]

Yeah, some sort of "oh, woe, my premonitions are coming true" thing, since that was pretty much it for her character development.

It was 1980, we were all ~15, and the only other thing I remember about that class was just a general sense of resentment - for long family drama reasons, I'd changed schools in the middle of the school year, from Ft Worth, Texas (where 9th grade was the last year of jr high) to Buffalo, NY (where it was the bottom of a 4 year high school), and the textbook we were using was the same one I'd had in 8th grade in Texas. And I didn't like the teacher, even before the inane writing prompt; this wasn't the first time she'd wanted us to write about feelings, of which I had quite a lot, none of which I felt the need to share.

[full_metal_ox]

Certainly not with an authority figure. A teenager’s home and belongings and time and person are all rummageable-through, and they assume they’re entitled to your feelings as well?

(And the next step from there is the sort of CEO who likes to describe the workplace as a family—which, in practice, works out to, “My way or the highway, and this is not a democracy, and when I say ‘Jump!’ the correct answer is ‘How high?’, and you are on call 24/7/366 because that’s how family works, and by the way, I’m announcing a midlife spousal upgrade because your mom is starting to sag.”)

[jamoche]

And can't be trusted not to share those feelings with the very parents who are causing all the problems.

Although there is one good thing about dysfunctional families: you spot the "workplace as a family" sort straight off the bat :)

[pedanther]

"What was Caesar's wife thinking during the assassination?" is not inherently a bad prompt for a piece of creative writing: dramatic irony is a thing, after all.

Given the context, though, I get the impression that I've already put more thought into this than the teacher had.