I take attendance by having the students answer a question.
What is the title of your autobiography?
I've expurgated names below to protect the innocent. As a side effect, this protects the rest, too.
Some people went with an extremely literal title:
- A Book about ME
- "Don't Read This Book"
- I
- [student's own name]'s Autobiography by [student's own name]
- "Book"
- A Book about [student's own initials]
- The Life + Times
- [student's own name]: A Life
- "I Should Write an Autobiography -- Selected musings of [student's own name]"
- The Brief Wondrous Life of [student's own name]
I'm a bit worried about that last one --- does that student for some reason expect to live a particularly "brief" life? Yikes.
Others made obscure references (?) that I hope would be thematically highlighted and tied together in the text of the autobiography:
- "Thoughts About Everything"
- "The Little Engine that Could"
- My Life by Bill Clinton (<-- amp="" art="" cover="" have="" li="" might="" misleading="" publisher="" the="" trouble="" with="">
-->
- "Sir"
- "Eh,"
- Content Free
- "No"
- Untitled
- I don't know
- 1337
- "ε"
Others chose something self-deprecating:
- "Fashionably Late and/or Asleep"
- A look at where it went wrong
- The Science of Laughing at Yourself
My favorite was easily "A look at where it went wrong", not only because it's a good hook --- I'm interested! I want to read that book! --- but also because either this student already thinks it's gone wrong, or this student anticipates that it will all go wrong sometime, for sure, and so that's a reliable autobiography title. Plus it's already funny. The title, at least, is going right!
This post's theme word is proem, "an introduction, preface, or preamble."
My autobiography consists of a series of proems --- I just haven't gotten to the significant stuff yet!