God said, "Are you going to pray?"

I said, "Yes, tomorrow, I’m driving home tonight."

He said, "No."

"No? What do you mean, no?"

God said, "Leave now. You must pray tonight too. Yom Kippur is for asking for
forgiveness, and you need more than one day."

I said, "God, I’m sorry—I just can’t leave now. I have English next period—tI just can’t
miss."

"You'd argue with God? I have the power of life and death... ."_ Suzie Silverman

Attendance is important, and I keep track of it. But the rollbook consequently becomes a type of negative
reinforcement which slightly tarnishes motivation, as does an assignment to get to page 127 by Wednesday,
even in a text that students may have wanted to read. "Excuses" help reverse this trend; even as students miss
class, they are creatively involved with its subject—composing.

One last benefit: these excuses are a bit like Rorschach tests. Preoccupations virtually froth into the
daylight. As we hear, from one man, excuses about packs of dogs chasing him into his car, mice and snails
sharing his dank prison walls, snipers following him on the freeway, we get a peek at his bad-dream material,
his sense of being hounded and caged. As we hear again and again, from one woman, stories of being swept
up by the wind and of jet flights to visit movie stars, we get a sense of her new freedom in being away from
home for the first time—and of her difficulty staying grounded amidst it.

Often recurring motifs emerge in a string of excuses, as in a series of paintings, by one artist:

. . . There was a message on my door saying, "If you want to see Gumby alive again,
report with two bags of lemon drops and a can of Mountain Dew to the lobby in ten minutes . .

.. . Once in the kitchen, my cucumber abductor shoved me against the wall. I looked up.
Across the room was a variety of domineering vegetables with ladles of cucumber dressing in
their clutches. (Flashes of eating my salad each night with cucumber dressing entered my mind,
and I wondered, "what will I be eating tonight? Fruit salad?")

. . as I was getting psyched to write my essay for class, I ate a Twinkie with pink filling.

The next thing I knew I was standing in my nightgown looking across the room at the
President of the United States... . Now the real question: why was there a gun in my hand?
What was I doing? | couldn’t kill Ronald Reagan. I might go to jail.

Against my will, I felt my hand rising and pointing the gun at Ronnie. I tried to fight what
was happening—it wasn’t me; it really wasn’t me. As I pulled the trigger, pink Twinkie filling
sprayed out. ... Heather Gower

And, as groups of artists are influenced by one another's work, students, inspired by one another's
excuses, begin to adopt new lines of fantasy, to discover new types of reverie. And the process is useful for me:
I think I learn more about where missing students have been from their lies than from their "real" excuses.
AUTHOR’S NOTE:

[This] writing assignment . . . at once deals with the problem of absence and helps to boost classroom
morale. Gary Short, who came up with the idea and who is now teaching at CSU Sacramento, tells me that it is
being used widely there. i.e.’s readers, community college instructors, might use this assignment even more
widely, since we have so many of the basic writing students to whom, I think, this assignment is best suited.

Gary Budd
Modesto Junior College

Reprinted with permission from inside english: Journal of the English Council of California Two-Year Colleges, Vol.
XII, No. 3, March 1985, p. 4 (Barbara Bilson, Editor, Santa Monica College, 1900 Pico Boulevard, Santa Monica,
CA 90405).

For further information, contact the author at Modesto Junior College, College Avenue, Modesto, CA 95350.

 

 

 

Suanne D. Roueche, Editor
August 9, 1985, Vol. Vil, No. 18

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