Would You Rather....

My school district has a goal.

Their goal is to fill my classroom with children who bear names that defy the laws of both logic and phonics.

Wait.

Scratch that.

That would be the parents in my school boundaries goal, not my school district's goal.

My school district's goal is to have every student write in complete sentences in every class.

Now, that might not sound like a difficult thing to some of you, but those with any teacher-ish experience will tell you that proclaiming a lofty ambition like that is tantamount to the declaring that a small group of parking attendants is going to convince every bird in the state to avoid pooping on cars.

Not that I am knocking the goal. As an English teacher, I spend quite a bit of my time begging kidlets to write in complete sentences. The problem is that asking a middle school student to write in complete sentences elicits the same sort of reaction that you would get if you asked them to give up their wii for a month, or to dismember their grandmother: shock, then horror, followed by alternating waves of physical pain and mental anguish.

So I decided that the best way to get the kidlets to write in complete sentences would be to make sure that they were too busy thinking about WHAT they were writing to complain about HOW they were being forced to write it.

Enter Zobmondo.

My friend Brook sent me this book as a birthday gift a few years ago and, although I have loved it since I first cracked the cover, I have only recently come to appreciate it as a vital tool for teaching. You see, Zobmondo is a book filled with very strange "would you rather..." questions. It poses quandaries that are so weird and so random that the fact I am making the kidlets give their answers in the form of "evil complete sentences of death" is immaterial.

On the first real day of school, my English kidlets bell work for the day consisted of answering the following question:

After staring at the board for several minutes and finally electing a brave soul to ask me if that was really their assignment, the kidelts got right to work formulating answers. One thoughtful student concluded that, "I would rather have a see-though nose because I think it would be really cool to be able to see my brain, and if I had completely white eye-balls I would look like I was dead."

When they returned the next day, the kidlets were meet with yet another important question, and once again, I didn't hear a single complaint, whine, or scream of agonizing pain about the complete sentences part of the assignment.

Now, I wouldn't recommend running out and buying a copy of this book for your child. Those of you who know and love my generous friend Brook may have already guessed that not every question in the book is kidlet-friendly. The questions I choose to pose to my classes are carefully selected to insure that the kids don't get embarrassed and that the health teachers don't get blasted with a certain type of question before they are fully prepared to start the "Your Changing Bodies" section of the curriculum. Or, you know, get me fired.

My main criteria for selecting a daily Zobmondo question is, "How painful for me will it be to read and grade 130 answers?" So far, it has actually been pretty fun.

"I would rather learn fire eating than sword swallowing because I could burp after I ate some and blow fire across the lunch room."

"I would rather eat fire instead of swords because once I got past the hot part it would probably taste kind of good."

"I would like to learn fire eating more than sword swallowing because it would be good to know how to do in case I got cold."

"I would rather learn how to eat fire because I didn't eat breakfast today and I am really hungry."

Thus far, Zobmondo has been a win-win-win situation for myself, the kidlets, and the district goal-setters. The seventh graders don't mind answering the questions, I don't mind reading the answers, and the district folks don't have to cough up the extra fundage it would require to send me for electro-shock sessions to cure the nervous tick I would have developed after having to listen to pre-teen sighs of annoyance every time I announced complete sentence writing practice.

Now, if somebody could just get to work on working toilet training every bird in the state, my life would officially be nearly perfect.