Student: Miss M, I made up a new word!
Me: Yeah? What is it?
Student: Plagiarism!
Me: That’s not a new- oh. Very funny.

That happened about ten minutes after I’d told this same student to walk down to our head custodian’s office to get me more tissue boxes, and he came back with a dozen boxes because, “You never specified how many more tissue boxes you wanted.” This student also wrote the words “good notes” five times when I asked him to put his phone away and give me at least five more good notes on the subject he was researching. 

So that tells you what kind of a day I had. 

It was a lot of laughs, but students also got a lot of work done (even that student, heh). They took a content quiz, finished the final drafts of their book papers, and started (or continued, if they were ahead) working on their research projects. There’s quite a range of topics: apartheid, the LRA, education, DDR of child soldiers, customs of certain tribal groups, the Lost Boys of Sudan, organizations fighting drought… These topics are inspired by the books they just read, and it’s so interesting to see what caught their attention. Sometimes, it’s the big, obvious stuff that’s central to the plot, and sometimes it’s the more minor details. Letting them pursue whatever they want means a higher level of engagement, and it means Mrs. T and I won’t have to listen to the same information being presented over and over again, so it’s a win all around.

I had one student in my Block 4 class get so into researching apartheid that she stayed in my room during Block 5 (she had study hall, it’s my prep block) to keep going. She’s got a pretty neat presentation planned out, too; she’s going to have her classmates draw cards with different scenarios on them, and then explain what would happen to a black person versus a white person in each scenario. Since she’s going to finish well ahead of the due date, she’s going to ask some of my APUSGOV students, who have study halls when she’s in my class, if they’d be willing to be her practice audience. I think this is an excellent plan.

It’s striking to me that a year ago today was the scariest day I’ve ever experienced, and today was just good. A friend of mine was worried about me after all of the things my school community went through last year- and there were a lot of things, and I couldn’t write about all of them- but I told him that it wasn’t going to leave a mark, not on me and not on my school. And it didn’t. We’re thriving.