My students crack me up. Seriously. Sure, they also exasperate and annoy and frighten me with their ludicrous behavior and even more ridiculous excuses for their behavior, but some days, they just crack me up. It's part of what keeps me coming back for more (abuse).
A couple of weeks ago, I assigned a creative writing assignment in my mid-level class as the culmination to our first unit - short stories and the elements of fiction. There were few parameters because the objective was for them to demonstrate that they knew what technical (structural?) components made a story a story. I gave them a pretty straightforward, but detailed rubric, gave them time to pre-write and draft in class, and then sent them on their merry ways for the long weekend. Once I'd collected them, I didn't get to reading and grading them for almost a week, and I was in for quite a surprise when I did. One of my students took my advice to "just take an ordinary incident you experienced and stretch the truth of it" quite literally and wrote a story about being assigned an open-ended writing assignment such as this one by a very intimidating teacher. I meant to copy the story, so I could post it along with this, anonymously of course, but our department's copier was on the fritz the day I was going to return the stories to my kids, and I just forgot to hold on to his story. Hopefully, he didn't toss it and I can get it from him to copy next week.
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