A while back when I was back home for the holidays, I was looking through some old elementary school stuff in a desk drawer when I found a notebook entitled “Tales From The Fifth Grade by Douglas McMorris”. Its a collection of all the papers I wrote (by hand) in the fifth grade for english glass. Naturally I started reading to see what on earth I was thinking in the fifth grade (or at least what the teacher was telling me I needed to write about).
Most of the papers are either descriptions about things with new vocabulary words or directions on how to perform a task, but there are also opinion pieces (I argue for year round school in one and say that “fast food restaurants are better than normal restaurants”) and a few brief stories.
One story is about a boy in 1867 Texas who decides to go to Mexico to mine for gold and then for some reason kills a rabbit with a hatchet and cooks it on a camp fire. He manages to strike gold in his mine, but gets robbed by Mexican soldiers on his way back to Texas (decent plot twist for a 10 year old).
Another of the stories is more or less the plot line for a bad Michael Bay sequel to Jurassic Park and set to take place in 2010 (far into the future for me as a fifth grader)… I decided to share it, unedited below:
Mr. Hang was a guard at the Tokyo Zoo. He is about 25 years old, 6′ tall, and very rude. He was watching the new dinosaur exhibit. In a few days it would be the year 2010 and when the New Years party was on in Tokyo, Japan no one expected this would happen. When it did, the city declared that it was in a state of panic and couldn’t do anything about it.
The dinosaur exhibit is mainly fossils, but there’s a massive cage. The scientist didn’t tell any one what was in the case. The scientist had been prevaricating for over 20 years. They had found the dinosaur in a inactive volcano during 1990. It was a very powerful tyranosaurs. It rammed the cage door and finally broke through the 3″ thick steel. The dinosaur then rammed the brick wall that surrounded the cage. When the bricks flew from the blow by the dinosaur they landed on Mr. Hang
The dinosaur left the zoo and headed to ward a skyscraper. The skyscraper was the tallist in the world with 128 floors. The dinosaur rammed the building and 75 floors collapsed. It couldn’t be stopped. The dinosaur was hungry, but couldn’t find any thing to eat. He tried a human and like it. Now he was leaning over and scooping his mouth over the street to catch people. He didn’t expect it, but when a semitruck rammed into his face he stopped. Now he was heading to ward the airport. An air plane was taking off behind him. The wings of the air plane hit his legs, and he fell down. When he got up he stomped on the air plane.
As soon as Mr. Hang found out what happened he drove his car over to the airport. When he arrived he had a way of apprehending the dinosaur. He told the scientist what he was going to do. It was a plan the scientist hadn’t thought of and Mr. Hang, who was a guard, had been contemplating it. His idea was to ram an airplane into the dinosaur and then while he was on the ground net him. Mr. Hang would have to be the pilot, which could mean certain death. Mr. Hang got in the airplane. He started the engine up, and he was about to take off when the dinosaur kicked the jet. Luckily Mr. Hang had jumped out of the jet right before the dinosaur kicked it. There weren’t any more planes left, now they called the U.S. army for help. The U.S. army came with 5 M-1 tanks, 2 armed rocket launchers, and 3 heat seeking missile silos. When they got there the commander of the army said, “Lock on and fire all weapons.” Blood splattered every where, covering half of Tokyo.
Today, in Tokyo the remains of the dinosaur have been preserved in a national monument as a reminder of the day the dinosaur escaped.
Apparently I was a much more creative kid than I remember… and appear to have known a lot more about weapons than dinosaurs or Japan.
For the record, I made the doodle on the top on my iPad today… any drawing from the fifth grade would have been considerably worse, if thats possible.
