Tornado waste of time

During my freshman and sophomore years, we had a thing called "Tornado Time Out For Reading," where we Tornadoes (the school's mascot) would take 20 minutes a day out of class time to read. It had to be a novel or at least some kind of fiction, and some teachers enforced this. Sometimes we had to write about what we read. What a way to make reading boring!

The first quarter of this school year was great in one respect. They told us at the beginning of the year that Tornado Time Out would be axed because the school finally realized that no one was reading, and so it wasn't doing anybody any good. And indeed, we've been Tornado-Time-Out-free... until today.

It had been announced that they were bringing it back, and they were right. In Tuesday we have to read in third block, and my third block (chemistry), the teacher always wastes class time doing Instructional Focus activities (basically reinforcing state standards). So we wasted double the class time today and will continue to do so on Tuesdays in her class. (At least she's doing Instructional Focus things that relate to chemistry now. The first semester we spent a significant amount of time in chemistry learning about plate tectonics.)

In English class we've been studying the Gothic writers like Edgar Allan Poe and the rest. Today we got an assignment to write such a short story in 2-3 pages, double-spaced. When you think about it, that's hardly any amount of writing at all. And in those 2-3 pages, you have to have these short story elements:

• Protagonist
• Antagonist
• Plot
• Conflict
• Resolution

Well, all short stories should have those, but we also have to include these Gothic elements:

• Exotic or unusual setting
• Set in the past
• Atmosphere of mystery, eeriness, dread/menace
• Symbolism
• Psychological elements (guilt/sin, intuition, moral conscience, etc.)
• Suspense

I've developed a pretty good story idea, except I don't know how I could throw symbolism in there. Symbolism and I don't get along very well. Anyway, my story will be one of those stories where science goes wrong. It might actually be more like science fiction than a Gothic story, but we'll call it Gothic science fiction (or, somebody please tell me what it's really called).

Leave it to Wikipedia to have a list of obsolete scientific theories. It's pretty interesting to see how our perception of things has changed over the centuries (or decades).

Dr Pepper is a popular soft drink. And just about every soda brand has to make its own ripoff of it, each with not only that peculiar sweet taste but also dark red packaging and a name beginning with "Dr." so you know it's a cheap ripoff of Dr Pepper when you see it on the shelves. Not Quite What the Doctor Ordered documents and reviews these Dr Pepper fakes.