Best of Week

Mr. Allen, I have got to hand it to you on this one: without your encouragement to place us in an environment where it's nothing but us students, a restaurant (and undoubtedly food) and hours of discussion, I would have in no way been able to conjure up a random, untruthful response to this task of "best of week". Truly, I didn't find this week all that inspiring in class; there were moments outside of class where I was inspired, sure, but certainly not during our fifty minutes of Lear-ification. I found this week to be pummeled by tasks, assignments, and some disappointments in this class and in the rest of school as well. Now, you know I'm a very positive person, and I'm a very thankful person, especially for the bad things that happen to us. So I'm not going to say any of this work was uncalled for; that's life. But, you, Mr. Allen, suggested something incredibly simple and un-genius-like that made the essay that you gave us (cette saloperie de composition!!) (< You told us about your days in college spent going to a dive bar to figure out an essay with your friends, done while consuming large amounts of cake, nachos, and coffee.
Pretty "darn" brilliant, I thought after doing just that myself. Well, replace "dive bar" with "north-shore uppercrust uber-expensive Panera Bread" and "nachos and cake" with...bread, and you have our version of said tactic. And I have to say, Socrates was onto something when he invented his "circle of discussion" (even though I believe someone else invented it and named it after the guy) because we, as a group, came up with so much more than I would have done holed-up in a little room, tempted to escape boredom and check facebook every five minutes.
You may be very excited to hear this, that I found your method so earth-shatteringly effective in getting our minds working to produce results. *NOTE: Yes, it was productive, and we generated a lot of great ideas, but I CANNOT promise perfect essays. Good ones, hopefully. But, if anything outside of our own personal drive and determination were to get us that "A" academites seem to value over all else, it would be the creativity and comfortable, positive environment inspired by Mr. Allen's college days eating nachos and drinking coffee in bars. (And...nachos and coffee?? Really??? Great alone, but TOGETHER...??)