Potomac's eighth grade English students read and discuss The House on Mango Street by Sandra Cisneros. The book is a series of short vignettes that together capture the characters, setting, and stories of a particular neighborhood in Chicago. The vignettes are written from the perspective of a fictional narrator and are based loosely on Cisneros's own experiences as well as those of her students. Some of the vignettes are humorous or action-packed; some are heart-wrenching or shocking. All are deliberate in their use of figurative language, poetic elements, grammar conventions, and pacing.

Each eighth grader composed at least one vignette for inclusion in this digital collection. They wrote in the style of Sandra Cisneros, as they interpreted it based on their notes and our class discussions, yet they set it in a time and place of their own choosing. While some of these vignettes are based on the author's personal experience, many of them are purely fiction, an imagining of characters and circumstances that seemed ripe for this assignment. Students also used this assignment to experiment with new vocabulary words and techniques involving punctuation and sentence structure.

We encourage you to leave comments below vignettes that strike you in some way. Please keep your comments positive and specific; this is not the place for critiques or suggestions. Enjoy the creativity and vibrancy of these students' literary efforts.

Wednesday, December 24, 2014

Bored

There’s nothing to do. Every afternoon it’s the same thing. Take the one hour bus ride home. Get my homework done. Study Spanish for half an hour. Practice on my drum set for half an hour. Then I workout. 

Then, I don’t have anything to do. My older sister has too much homework to hang out with me. My younger sister claims to have too much homework even though she’s in fifth grade! My dad usually doesn’t come home from the office until dinner time. My mom is usually working out. My au pair is too lazy to do anything with me, and there aren’t any kids in my neighborhood who are my age.

Normally, when there’s nothing to do, I just sit on the couch and watch TV or play video games. But it just gets boring after a while. There’s nothing else to do but read a book. Yet, I can’t find any topic that interests me. I quit all of my after school sports because now that I’m in eighth grade I can just join my school’s sports teams. 

There’s nothing left to do. There’s never anything left to do.

~ George M.

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