Spanish Homework

Here we have two assignments from a Spanish workbook. Both were submitted by a fellow named John, and this is not his first appearance here.

In the first, which was an in-class assignment, he records his name both as "Don Juan" and "Puff Padre" (no doubt both an homage to the artist formerly known as Puff Daddy and a reference to his penchant for smoking alternative tobaccos). He completes the assignment (sloppily, but at least legibly), but in the margins he spends his extra time doodling - here a shaggy face, there an amoeba. On the right-hand side there is a rather boxy depiction of a cow (we know it's a bovine only because it is mooing), and the grader remarks, "This indicates playing around during class = unacceptable behavior". You tell 'em!

The second assignment was one he completely forgot about until the teacher started walking around desks to collect it. He did what any resourceful student would do: in the remaining seconds he had, he drew squiggly lines all over the page. The teacher hilariously replies, "¿What?"

Horror Story

The product of a tenth-grade creative writing assignment, this unfinished thriller was a split-setting parable about a post-nuclear wasteland, ostensibly with the conceit that the loner and the group would eventually unite. While the story makes no explicit references, there are shades of DOOM here, in structure and spirit. The male characters are depictions of students - the one, a thinly-disguised portrait of a class eccentric, and the other, a rakish, clowning fellow named John Manzella. (The part about "Boyzella" was inspired by actual events; he was called this by the school principal after a public bout of mischief.) I have no idea who Donna and Yusuke are. The writing was done in two installments, hence the two half-pages - and the two different, all-caps-lock fonts, which add to the dramatic tension.