Blog Day 1

Image: Students are sitting around a cluster of tables in their classroom.
They are typing on their laptops. 

The speculative fiction A-Term started out simply, with a room full of students writing for 30 minutes. This would start a simple tradition that would continue in the days moving forward, where every day the first 30 minutes of the morning would be spent writing a story based on a writing prompt. The prompt of the first day was "Change one thing about the world." The limits of this prompt were that it had to be something large enough to impact the greater scale of the world, but not too big. The examples of the extremes would be "dyeing your hair blue for one day" and "there are now two suns." Some of the things that the students wrote about included "What if elephants were the size of cats but had the same density?" and "What if air was hydrogen sulfide gas?" This led to a fine start for the A-Term.

From then on the students spent about an hour learning about the different assignments they would have to do during the A-Term. This translated into the next assignment, which was a presentation. Half of the class split to work on a science fiction presentation, while the other half worked on a fantasy presentation. This took us around an hour or so to complete, and the presentations themselves took around 30 minutes. By the time this assignment was done, it was lunchtime. The main homework assignment that we had to do by the end of the A-Term was an 8-15 page long short story. We also had to watch a movie series or a TV show and read a book or 5 short stories.

Image: Students are sitting around a cluster of tables in their classroom.
All are turned toward the television on which The Matrix is playing. 

After Lunch, we started on a more fun but less interactive activity, watching the Matrix. Surprisingly, most people in the class had not yet watched The Matrix, which led to an entertaining experience as after the movie they had the "Post-Matrix Mental DestructionTM" which is essentially the feeling after the matrix that you get which is simply looking at the spoon that you're using the eat your ice-cream and thinking "Is this real?" Though most people didn't like it that much, it was mainly for reasons pertaining to the time it came out, such as the number of cliches, or the dated SFX. By the end of the day, we hadn't been able to start up this blog (which is why this is coming out on Tuesday), and we were leaving at 3:30.