Teacher Perks

This morning I braided my hair in a side braid (like my sister Ivy frequently wears).  One of my 6th graders walked in and said, "Miss H! I almost didn't recognize you! For a second I thought you were your sister Ivy and she was substituting today!"  Either way, I'd still be Miss Heintz.


Last night I read all but two of my students' NaNo stories.  Just in case you don't remember, they spent all of November each writing a story at least 2,000 words (a lot wrote more than that for our class's grand total of 54,693 words).  It takes quite a long time to read all those words! 


One not-so-publicized teacher "perk", shall we say, is that students frequently put teachers in their writing.  I made appearances in at least three of their stories.  My favorite of these cameos is where my friend Melvin from high school moves to Courtland and is my next door neighbor and we get together all the time to go up to Swanies for pizza or we grill out... and pretty soon he gets the job as a para for my class so we carpool to work and church... and then he comes with me to the library and joins my pottery class... and he doesn't have anywhere to go for Thanksgiving, so he asks if he can come home with me and spend time with my family and my sisters (they're listed by name)... and the last month of school he makes treats for the whole class every day.  And then in the summer it turns out he gets his old job back at the Ford dealership in New Ulm so he's not coming back to school to be the para next year, but he gets a discount on car fixes, so he buys parts for my car really cheap... As you can tell, it's quite the story.


I have one and a half stories to read, but they're the longest ones, so it will take a while to get through them.  Their assignment today was to read through their stories and read my comments... not make any marks on them! Just read it.  Tomorrow we're going to outline our stories on the plot rollercoaster worksheet to see where our stories could use some plot work. 


I'm leaving school at 5:30 tonight!  Pretty close to my New Year's resolution.