Day 26

This was the last day for students to finish up their own short stories. On this day before Spring Break, when most kids were probably visualizing themselves running through their free-from-school world, my 125 students clicked away on keyboards, referring to their revision guides.

For the first time all year, I spotted a good number of kids marking up their text with proofreading marks and notes to themselves in the style that I mark their papers. The messiest papers were the ones that earned highest praise from me this week. "Check out that active writing," I'd say to my student-teacher, and we'd smile with pride. A couple of students even asked me, "How do you make that dash? Not a comma, but different from the three dots?" These impressionable kids--they're just so easy to mold. Maybe they could ignore daydreams because they were concentrating on their own fantasy worlds on the page instead.

My students complete a portfolio self-evaluation at the end of the quarter. This time, they included their memoirs, a drabble or two, and their short stories, all of which shared some major writing tools like dialogue, character development, setting, etc. They responded to the question, How do you see yourself improving as a writer this year? Most of them are only twelve, and they've never been asked this question before, so I love to get a glimpse of how they see themselves. I read that they think that their description is better, they can write more than before, or they like the way they can shape a character with action and dialogue. By third quarter, there's a rise in confidence in themselves. They've got the middle school thing down. They're even beginning to believe me when I tell them, "You are all writers."

Now vacation is here. Oftentimes, that means that the kids will return to school to hit a mad-dash to some standardized tests. We'll begin fourth quarter of a year that seems to be flying by, and it won't be long before they are long-gone into dreams of summer. Pre-summer lethargy will set in. It's the natural rhythm of a school year, no matter how much we try to fight it. Maybe that's what made their focus, their attention to their writing, and their messy edits, that much more enjoyable today.