下面分享一篇KooSchool的金牌外教Charles老师指导Emily（初中 Grade 7）同学的一篇非常精彩的作文，以下黑色部分大部分是Emily的原文，红色部分是在老师指导后修改增加的。这篇作文是对经典童话故事”小红帽和狼外婆”进行批判性思考后的独立创作。

Not-so-Red Riding Hood

Once upon a time, in a small and peaceful village, there lived a sweet, kind, but otherwise quite ordinary, girl.

Because she loved wearing a bright red-hooded cloak that her mother had made for her, the villagers used to call her “Red Riding Hood”.

One Autumn day, Red Riding Hood’s mother gave her a basket full of treats to take to her grandmother who lived on the other side of the woods.

The girl went off down the path that led to her grandmother’s house obediently and happily.

The trail was easy to follow, the weather was good, and so was her mood.

She made up little songs that she sang to herself while she walked, without a care, deeper into the woods.

She was so wrapped up in her songs, she didn’t notice how unusually dark the woods were becoming, and how the birds had all gone silent.

It wasn’t until she realized that the only sound left in the woods was her own voice, that she stopped and looked around.

There was a deathly quiet. Not a living thing moved. A cloud had covered the sun, and the woods were almost dark.

What happened next?

Maybe some people know, but they don’t seem to want to talk about it.

Instead, people have invented countless different theories.

Someone said her grandmother went crazy and killed her own granddaughter.

But this seems like an unreliable story: why would a nice old granny commit such a brutal act?

Somebody else said that the part of the woods where her grandmother lived was haunted and that Red Riding Hood was taken away by an evil spirit.

Another story is that a wolf appeared out of nowhere and just ate her up, there and then.

Others say that the wolf wasn’t an ordinary wolf at all but a special kind of wolf.

And that he made a cunning plan.

He went ahead to her grandmother’s house, ate the poor granny up, put on her nightgown, and waited in bed for Red Riding Hood to arrive.

When the girl entered the house, it was quite dark inside, which might explain her confusion over the appearance of her ‘granny’, and why she spoke these famous lines:

“Granny, what big ears you have!” To which the wolf replied, “All the better to hear you with, my dear.”

Then she said, “Granny what big eyes you have!” And he said, “All the better to see with, my dear”, and so on, until she mentioned his enormous teeth!

At which point, the wolf replied: “ALL THE BETTER TO EAT YOU WITH!” and jumped out of the bed, and ate the innocent girl!

Of course, not many people believed that a girl as smart as Red Riding Hood would be confused by a wolf dressed up as an old lady.

And besides, who’s ever heard of a talking wolf?

Nevertheless, this is the most popular version of the story, the one that we tell our children today. But children from Red Riding Hood’s own village were not so easily fooled.

A group of adventurous kids went into the woods to try to find the real reason for Red Riding Hood’s disappearance.

They found the woods damp, and surprisingly cold for some reason. The trees were mostly dead with bare lifeless branches hanging down, covered with moss.

At the back of the group was one particular kid, who was more scared than the others, quivering with fear and wishing he’d hadn’t come on this expedition.

When he felt a wet, damp hand grab him by his shoulder, he almost jumped out of his skin. He spun around and gasped at what he saw.

There, behind him, was a small girl in a hooded cloak, which was all dirty and covered in mud, looking down at him. She was floating slightly above the ground, drifting listlessly in the air, like a broken doll.

Suddenly she tilted her head up and bared her teeth, curled her chapped lips, and smiled a smile that was more like a snarl.

The kid screamed and ran wildly away, but tripped on a tree root, fell over and banged his head, which knocked him out.

So he didn’t see what happened next.

Maybe the rest of the group turned around to find their friend on the ground with this strange apparition hovering above him.

Maybe they weren’t scared at all and kept on walking and then just happened to get lost and died of hunger.

Or maybe, in their terror, they ran off in every direction, each one ending up alone the deep dark maze of trees.

We will never know, because that group of kids - well, they never walked out of the woods and were never heard of again.

All we do know is that the first kid eventually woke up to find all his friends had gone.

Somehow managed to walk out of the woods and return to his village with no serious injuries but he never said anything about what happened that day in the woods.

The parents of the missing children searched the woods over and over again for them, but to no avail. In the end they gave up, and life in the village carried on as before.

The boy who came back grew into man, got married, had children, and they had children of their own.

Many many years later, when he was an old man, he overheard his grandchildren being told the story of Red Riding Hood.

And how they loved the story of the wolf dressed up as a grandmother, and how Red Riding Hood had been eaten up by the talking wolf!

But as he listened to the tale, he thought to himself that this could not be what happened, that she had not been eaten by a wolf after all.

He realised he was the only one in the world who knew Red Riding Hood’s true fate.

The only one who knew about the ghostly young girl forever lost in the woods.

And who knew that her hooded cloak, although dirty and ragged, was RED!

时间： 2020年1月16日完成。