Kalessin is doing The Canterbury Tales in “core class”. He wrote a required five paragraph essay about his favorite tale, the Pardoner’s Tale. I noticed the following paragraph in it:

The second reason I like this story is because it is funny. While it may seem sad that the friends died because of their greed, since this is fictional, I find it humorous. Another thing that makes me laugh is that they try to “find” death, but in turn death finds them. These things all seem to be funny to me. I’m sorry if my humor is a bit dark.

I am just reading Stephen King’s On Writing, in which he mentions having to explain to readers who accuse him of cruelty to animals because of something that a character in a book does to a dog that the character wasn’t real, and the dog never existed. In other word’s, it’s fiction. Kalessin seems to get this.

So maybe kids are learning something in school these days….

Not as much as they would want to, though–the kid complained that even though there are twenty-something Canterbury tales, they only let them read (in modern adaptation, of course) four, because the others are not appropriate for children. “Dude, that sucks. I want to read the others,” he says. “And like we already know all that bad stuff anyway. You should hear what people are talking about at lunch.”