One of my favorite books in college was Catch-22. It’s so long ago that I don’t know what drew me to it, but I just watched the Mike Nichols’s movie version this summer and understand much of the Catch-22 philosophy through teaching experience. The scene with Snowden came to me today–it’s the flashback that Yossarian has with Private Snowden, who is just a young kid that rides in a bomber plane with Yossarian, who is more of a veteran. The flashbacks get longer and longer as the novel progresses, as Snowden goes from the kid who is injured (a leg injury maybe) to the final flashback where Yossarian pulls at the uniform and we see guts spill out all over the plane and it becomes apparent that Snowden can’t be saved because the problem is much worse than originally thought.
Today I gave a baby test on The Count of Monte Cristo. 31 kids got an A (three perfect scores), B, or C, but five students got a D, and 18 received an F.
They just pulled back their uniforms and out came the guts.
There, there. There, there. There, there.