Weird High School Projects -- Bragging Rights

[Krieg]

In my HS American History class we were allowed a good bit of leeway for alternatives to a term paper. The downside was that the subject was drawn at random out of a hat.

I ended up with the JFK assassination.

I decided to refute the many "second shooter" theories.

For my project I managed to get the teacher to schlep the entire class on a field trip to a friend's farm where I had set up a re-enactment of dealey plaza. I duplicated the circumstances of the shooting. Range, angle & velocity of the target.

Using an M91/38 Mannlicher-Carcano I showed that not only could I reliably duplicate putting rounds on target in the same time as Oswald (if it was indeed him firing from the Book Depository).

To underscore the point, my rifle coach (I started shooting competitive shooting around age 14) spent about 2 months teaching basic marksmanship to a female classmate who had previously never fired a weapon. She was also able to duplicate the feat with little difficulty.

Of course if I attempted that in today's high school climate, I would probably be expelled and/or incarcerated. lol

 

[demiurge1138]

Well, let's see...
For starters, in my Rhetoric class in 10th grade I delivered a 10 minute oratory on Dungeons and Dragons. Specifically, the accusations of Satan-worship and all that. I got an A on that one.

Then there was the essay I wrote on the culture of ENWorld for my English 11 class. That time around, I focused on the BOVD debates (this was only last year) and the diversity of peoples and opinions on the boards. I got an A on that one too.

Then, this year, in my English AP class, I decided to go a little out of my way when our teacher asked us to try to translate and poetify 10 lines of Beowulf from the Old English. So I re-wrote the entire poem. In limerick. That was a lot of fun.

Demiurge out.

 

[ConnorSB]

*Prays that no one finds this political*

I hate the french language. I took it for 3 years in HS (I'm a senior in HS now). After the first semester, I NEVER got better than a C+ in the class. Awful.

But for my final project, I did a video that was one of the "Lost Chapters" of "The Little Prince," the famous book by that aviator french guy. For those who haven't read it, a little boy who lives on a tiny planet wanders through space and has a bunch of interesting and insiteful conversations with a king, a drunk, an arrogant man, etc. He lands on earth, and has a nice discussion with the author, who had crashed his plane in the desert.

Anyway, in the video, the prince talks to George Bush Jr. All of bush's lines are his "bushisms" (all those times he misunderestimates the english language). Translated into French. With the battle hymn of the republic playing in the background. For 10 minutes. With subtitles. I won't say any more, as it would stray too far into the political, but suffice to say the class thought it was excelent satire.

I got an A on that project. That was the first, last, and only time I ever got an A on anything in French.

 

[Krieg]

All of bush's lines are his "bushisms"

Kinda like "misunderestimates"?

 

[ConnorSB]

If we are allowed to post two entrys, here goes # 2.

In economics class, we each have to give a presentation on something related to economics. So I did a 45 minute presentation on the joys of making money illegally.
My favorite part was the research I got to do. I did a bunch of it.

I found the 10% of the class that does a lot of drugs, and got them all to go to thier dealers and ask for "real numbers." Then I went home and did some math, and came back with some... interesting results. Since this topic might be not approved by Eric's Granny, if you want to know them, email me at connor_sb@yahoo.com.

Another thing I got to do was find out some of the really great gambling stories and legends of the past and present. My favorite is the debter who settles with the NYC mafia by challenging the loanshark to a duel- between the debtor's ferret and the loanshark's vicious cat. It was a fight for... the ages.

I got an A on that project too.

 

[ThirdWizard]

In Latin class, we had to do a project dealing somehow with ancient Rome. I decided, as it was, to do an infomercial selling ancient roman stuff! But, I couldn't make it so easy, no, I had to do it in stop motion animation. It was so long ago I can barely remember the details, but I think one of the best parts was when the info-seller was throwing in one random thing after another, and he threw in a slave who proceded to say "bar bar bar bar bar." Somebody got the joke and yelled out "It's a Bar Bar!" which we all knew to be a barbarian (roman named because they thought other languages were jibberish "bar bar bar").

Okay, so maybe you had to be there.

But, my teacher kept the tape and as far as I know still shows it!

 

[ConnorSB]

Kinda like "misunderestimates"?

I did that on purpose! No fair criticizing irony! Thats not nice!

 

[tarchon]

I synthesized skunk scent in O-chem.

 

[Impeesa]

In my high school, you were required to do a 5-minute speech for English class. For grades 10 and 12, I did mine on roleplaying. In the grade 12 one, I retold the Plasma Jelly Incident* and got surprisingly few comments on it afterwards. Pleasantly surprising.

For CAPP 11 (career and personal planning), we had to do some sort of final project on 'something that affects our lives'. As an example, another group did made a video about going to university, shot mostly on the local campus. My partner and I did a detailed report about necrotizing fasciitis - the so-called killer flesh eating disease. I didn't take that class too seriously after the little aptitude tests put "social" as my lowest scoring category by a decent margin, rating it a meagre "well above average."

As for coilguns, I toyed with the idea of building a superconducting coilgun this summer, but decided against it. The key is being friendly with a few professors who can hook you up with the really good materials.

*Plasma jelly is kind of like C4, an electrically-triggered spreadable explosive from the game Alternity. It happened once during the raiding of a research complex that one hapless guard hadn't been slaughtered, but instead merely knocked unconscious. We tied him to a chair, smeared the stuff on his face (I wanted to inject it into his eyeballs but no one was packing a needle), and waited for him to come around. We let him sweat just long enough to realize just what was happening as the mindwalker tickled him from the toes up to the face.... with electrokinetics. Boom.

 

[Mercule]

So DID they all take it as a joke? Or did some of their parents call the school the next day?

So far as I know, no parents called. That teacher wasn't there the next year, though. Not saying I or my speech had anything to do with it. Just that they probably wouldn't have told me if it did.

I did discover that there were, apparently, whispered rumors about me for the rest of my high school days. I think it was just the one guy who I threatened to make disappear if he didn't stop heckling me, though. (For the record, he did stop heckling, and I think my exact words were something like, "I'd beware what you say, if you want to see Monday next".)

Y'know, come to think of it, I honestly can't believe I didn't get expelled. I think I actually got an A, even.