Survivor

The things my kiddos talk about at lunchtime always amazes me.  Today I was only partly paying attention when I tuned in to two 5th graders in a heated dialogue about Adam and John.  Something about one of the guys hiding food and eating it later and him being so much stronger.  But they thought he was being dumb and they really though the other guy was right... It took me a minute to realize they were talking about the TV show Survivor.  Man, they get into that show!

Have I ever mentioned my student who lost his entire NaNo? He had been typing it in Microsoft Word and I wanted him to upload it to the NaNo website so his stats/word count would go towards our whole goal. He copied and pasted his story onto the site and then decided to delete from the Microsoft Word document.  Uh, okay, if you really want to... After he put it on the website, I checked our class page to see how much his words affected our class total.  The site showed he still had zero words.  So I told him to save it.  And he did, but my computer still showed he'd written zero.  He was adamant that it saved, so I said okay, and left it at that.

It turns out, it hadn't saved.  So all his 800 words were gone.  And since he'd deleted the words from his Word document, they truly were gone; we couldn't undo the deleting.  I called the IT guys a few times to see if they could recover it, but they couldn't find a backup.  This poor kid had lost all will to write now that his words were gone.  I talked to his mom after basketball practice last night to see if he could write at home so he could meet his 3,000 word goal by the end of the month.  Sounds like a plan!

Today I offered to type while he dictated and he now has 743 words! His will to write is back!  I talked to a bunch of parents tonight at conferences about letting their kids have writing time over Thanksgiving break especially, just so we meet our goals.  I love NaNoWriMo, but I will definitely be glad when November is over.  I must admit, I'm behind on my goal.  I didn't write any words last night, so tonight I need to write about 1900.

I only have two more conferences left.  They've gone well so far!  I've stayed pretty close to my schedule; there were only two or three I went over by a little bit.  But I had empty slots sprinkled around the schedule and was able to get back on track.  The PTL fed us tonight too: ham sandwiches, chips/salsa, vegetables/dip, and cracker bars for dessert.  Mmm, mmm, mmm!  And I actually had time to eat tonight too!