I couldn't believe the size of her...

Faithful readers-

First of all, I do apologize for the delay in updates- I have received several angry emails demanding new posts, so I am sacrificing a perfectly good Wednesday night to sit in bed and write.*

TEACHING IS GOING SO WELL. I love it. This has been a particularly fun week because I have gotten to spend more and more time interacting with the students. Additionally, I teach two lessons before school on Mondays and Fridays. It's practice for the 8th grade English competition and around 8 kids usually show up. I have a considerable amount of freedom in how I teach them, and I have been designing lessons based on how they have done on their practice exams. In last weeks' practice exam, students were given the following list to include in an essay:
1. What kind of a student you are
2. What kind of a student you'd like to be
3. What a typical student is like

In general, they failed miserably. 3 students turned in the assignment, and of those three, not a single one had answered all of the questions. The best response that I got was 'I-m a normal student, i-m kinda awesome. I'm in the 8th grade. Sometimes I get bured in school. I wud like to be a smart student.' (obviously, they got points for stating that they are awesome. Mostly because I have definitely given the same response at several times in my life).
Based on their lack-of-completion/fail, I decided to organize an activity where I gave students 7 partial sentences, and gave them the mission to write a creative story including at least 5 completed sentences. They thrived. Sentences included:
In rained for...
I couldn't believe the size of her...
It was a cold, dark, windy...
boys have cooties, at least that's what my
I heard, but I didn't believe

If ANYONE would be brave enough to write a story and email it to me, that would be awesome. I would love for my students to read what you have written! Here are some excerpts from my students' best:
#1It was a cold, dark, windz night. Ther ewas a fridge called Biffz. When I woke up, I came to the fridge and took some milk and started drinking. It was grey. Then I took some ham, it was also grez. I didn-t know what happened... there were too many things grey. (Story goes on to tell about a mysterious woman coming in, waving her arms over the fridge and putting everything back to its normal color).
#2...the girls couldn't believe the size of her cookie. They thought it was made of paper, but it was made of snow because it was winter. They went into the kitchen. It was cold, dark, and windy in the fridge. Girls thought the electricity was down, but no. That fridge had gone mad. The boys looked up ''Cookie Jar Goes Wrong'' on the internet...
#3- Starts out as a ghost story, like everything she has written thus far: ...Something creeked: We were scared. Very scared. And then in the next moment a woman appeared in front of us. She was very scary. We screamed. But not because we were so scared, but because we couldn't believe the size of her ears! She was like an elephant...

Maybe those segments do not make any sense to you. I could already be blinded by getting to know these kids and understanding what they mean. However, hopefully they provided some substance to better imagine my life over here.


In two weeks, we will finish with this particular before-school-lesson, but I think that I am going to ask the principal if I can continue to host a creative writing workshop. Thoughts? I think that I'm alright at creative writing... I guess it's between that or a tutorial on how to Rick Roll.

'Till next time, homies. With love, Nika

*Ok, truthfully, I just received one email about the blog. Thanks dad. Hope this suffices. And I have absolutely no energy to move from this very comfortable spot where I am eating garden fresh strawberries and chocolate and drinking piping hot mint tea.