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  3. I was in my third year of teaching creative writing at Ralph McKee Vocationa

I was in my third year of teaching creative writing at Ralph McKee Vocationa

游客2023-11-09  22
问题     I was in my third year of teaching creative writing at Ralph McKee Vocational School in Staten Island, New York, when one of my students, 16-year-old Mikey, gave me a note from his mother. It explained his absence from class the day before.
    I had seen Mikey writing the note at his desk, using his left hand to disguise his handwriting. I said nothing. Most parental-excuse notes I received back in those days were penned by my students. They’d been forging excuse notes since they learned to write, and if I were to confront each forger I’d be busy 24 hours a day.
    I threw Mikey’s note into a desk drawer along with dozens of other notes. While my classes took a test, I decided to read all the notes I’d only glanced at before. I made two piles, one for the genuine ones written by mothers, the other for forgeries. The second was the larger pile, with writing that ranged from imaginative to lunatic.
    I was having an idea.
    Isn’t it remarkable, I thought, how the students complained and said it was hard putting 200 words together on any subject? But when they forged excuse notes, they were brilliant. The notes I had could be turned into a collection of Great American Excuses. They were samples of talent never mentioned in song, story or study.
    How could I have ignored these gems of fiction and fantasy? Here was American high school writing at its best—raw, real, urgent, brief, and lying. I read:
    "The stove caught fire and the wallpaper went up and the fire department kept us out of the house all night."
    "Arnold was getting off the train and the door closed on his school bag and the train took it away. He yelled to the conductor who said very vulgar things as the train drove away."
    "His sister’s dog ate his homework and I hope it chokes him."
    The writers of these notes didn’t realize that honest excuse notes were usually dull: "Peter was late because the alarm clock didn’t go off."
    One day I typed out a dozen excuse notes and distributed them to my senior classes. The students read them silently, intently. "Mr. McCourt, who wrote these?" asked one boy.
    "You did," I said. "I omitted names to protect the guilty. They’re supposed to be written by parents, but you and I know the real authors. Yes, Mikey?"
    "So what are we supposed to do?"
    "This is the first class to study the art of the excuse note—the first class, ever, to practice writing them. You’re so lucky to have a teacher like me who has taken your best writing and turned it into a subject worthy of study."
    Everyone smiled as I went on, "You didn’t settle for the old alarm clock story. You used your imaginations. So try it now. Imagine you have a 15-year-old who needs an excuse for falling behind in English."
    The students produced excuses, ranging from a 16-wheeler crashing into a house to a severe case of food poisoning blamed on the school cafeteria. They said, "More, more. Can we do more?"
    So I said, "I’d like you to write—" And I finished, "’An Excuse Note from Adam to God’ or ’An Excuse Note from Eve to God.’" Heads went down. Pens raced across paper.
    Before long the bell rang. For the first time ever I saw students so immersed in their writing they had to be urged to go to lunch by their friends. [br] The author found that compared with the genuine excuse notes, the forged ones were usually
选项 A、less impressive.
B、more imaginative.
C、better-written.
D、less convincing.
答案 B
解析 第10段提到作者认为honest excuse notes通常很dull，这暗示学生自己写的请假条与这些honest excuse notes相反，结合第3段中的from imaginative to lunatic可知学生写的请假条更有趣。更富有想象力，故应选B。作者并没有评论这些请假条的内容是否给人以深刻印象或有多令人信服．故A和D均不可选；一篇文章是否“写得好”(well-written)，不能光从“想象力”这一方面去评判，因此，虽然作者认为学生自己写的请假条很富有想象力，但不能就此说这些请假条“写得好”，可见C不正确。
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