The 2009 Direct Writing Assessment, Part 2

Before we begin round two of this year’s Direct Writing Assessment Greatest Hits, I think I should provide a little more evidence that our species is not doomed .

Exhibit A: “Because of the Holocaust the world had to decide where to put the Jews. Of course, the Holy Land, and then that just started a whole lot of other problems.”

Exhibit B: “Curiosity is a friend of mine, so I just had to investigate.”

Exhibit C: “When my parents divorced I became two different people, my dad’s house guest and my mom’s best friend.”

See, most 7th graders can be very creative and insightful when they want to be.

But, because they are so darn entertaining, here are a few more exceptions that prove the rule.

One poor girl wrote about being injured while roller-skating because she was blinded by the disco ball.

One little guy wrote about an injury, but managed to look on the bright side: “I got 16 stitches in my chin but it wasn’t all bad cause I had a good lookin nurse.”

One kid took the prompt very literally and wrote about what they would change about their HISTORY CLASS. “I would change history so we could do our homework in class… I would also make it so the teacher couldn’t give us more than two assignments a day and we could go to the restroom whenever we need to.”

"Car accidents do not lead to a good time. "

A 7th grade girl wished she could go back to the beginning of her 6th grade year to stop herself from “falling in love” with her sixth grade boyfriend. I thought her description of that first meeting was interesting in that it explains what a sixth grader is looking for in a relationship. “He was kind, sweet, cute, and lived within walking distance. So you can see how I fell for him.”

One peace-loving kidlet was especially concerned with war. Or, more specifically, with the death tolls of various wars and their effects on the human population. “Eventually there will be more bunnies than people. As a result, unless you want to be a bunny slave, I suggest you stop killing each other.”

A Little More 7th Grade Revisionist History
“I would change what happened when President Bush gave a speech in Iraq. Someone in the audience threw a shoe at his head. In Iraq, that is the worst insult you can give. Angry, President Bush ended the speech by declaring war. I think declaring war on a whole country when just one person throws a shoe at your head is a real waste of money and soldiers.”

“I wish Black Beard the pirate had not been killed. I would make him sketch a map to his treasure so I could dig it up.”

One creative little guy thought that the discovery of America would have been much more interesting if… “Columbus drove speed boats and the Indians lived in really nice trailers in a trailer park by the dock.”

Thanks to our red-state (red-neck?) status, there were a LOT of essays about changing the results of the last presidential election. Some of the comments the kids made were so ignorant and hateful, I briefly considered moving, but others were just so dumb I couldn’t help but snicker. For example, kidlet wanted to change presidents because,“Obama makes laws about how big our TV can be.”

This is the first paragraph from an essay titled, Truth About Salem. “Salem Oregon; such a beautifully simple town. It was not always like this, though. Dark secrets are hidden beneath its streets. Mysteries that will give not only children, but adults nightmares. This of course is why I want to go back and change the Salem Witch Trial so that it never happens.”


“I would change the Boston Tea party, because it just wasn’t cool and was a serious downer. Instead, we would have a holiday about balloons on June 10th, my birthday. We just don’t have enough holidays honoring balloons.”


Hurricane Katrina was a popular subject:

“I wish the Katrina water had turned to cottage cheese so no one got hurt."

“I would change Hurricane Katrina to something less deadly, like an alligator raid or raining Pepsi cans.” That would be awesome and a miracle.”

In the last post, I shared a few samples from the thousands of essays written about World War Two. The only topic that the 7th graders found more change-worthy than the holocaust or the attack on Pearl Harbor, was September 11th, 2001. Reading about the tragic events of that morning over and over and over and over and over and over could have gotten kind of rough…if the kids had actually known anything about what they were writing about.

You would not BELIEVE how many essays about 9/11 started out with, “If I could change on event in history, I would change 9/11. I don’t know what day it happened, but….” For example…

“I don’t know what the date was, but it happened at 9:11 in the morning.”

“On that day in November, at 9:11 a.m., millions of people died.”

“I don’t know when 9/11 happened, but it was soon after it that they named the emergency number 911.”

“9/11 happened when two Vietnamese military men decided to get revenge on the United States once and for all.”

“I would change how the Nazi’s blew up the twin towers.”

“One plane hit the twin towers and the other was going to hit the Octogon.”

One kid thought the terrorists deserved to be “remurdered”. I agreed.

“After the tourists knocked down the first twin tower, they flew around and knocked down the other one. Then they decided to do the same thing to the White House, but the president flew back to DC and stopped them… I don’t know if those tourists ever got caught.”

“If I could change one event, it would be 9/11. I would change it by getting Chuck Norris to help take-out Bin Laden.”

Noble Attempts at Figurative Language
"She pulled me so hard I thought dogs would start crying."

"I was walking with my friend and my big fat 5th grade mouth said the meanest thing in history."


A Few More Spelling Issues
"Call me old fasten."
One poor girl was traumatized after learning that 2,000 mustangs were recently “youthinized”.


Similes and Metaphors
"Hurricane Katrina was as horrible as a cat locked in a cage with birds."

"Before my grandpa died, he was like a train: all great and grand, then he got some kinks, then he crashed."

One little guy wrote about his ward boundaries being changed during stake conference. He said he kept trying to ask his parents what was going on, but “They shook me off like a dog shakes off water after going swimming.”

"The Japanese forever cut through the Pacific Islands like a samurai sword through a watermelon."

"The Beatles went out faster than a tube of red lipstick at Courtney Love’s house."

"My parents take away privileges faster than a starving wolf would kill a one legged deer."

The 2009 Winner of the Miss H Award Excellence in Essay Writing is…
“I wish I wouldn’t have let my friend shake my hamster till he peed.... I wish I hadn’t made him go through the tube he didn’t fit through.”
In conclusion, somewhere in the state of Idaho there are 47 very tired, yet entertained 7th grade English teachers, 19,000 brilliant and/or confused 7th graders, and one very traumatized hamster.

Please pray for us all.

The 2009 Direct Writing Assessment, Part 1

In November of 2009, over 19,000 Idaho seventh graders wrote essays about a single topic: If you could change any historical event, from world history or your personal history, what event would you change and why?

This week, 45 English teachers meet in Boise to grade those essays. Each essay had to be graded twice, so it took a while. What follows are quotations from actual student essays, written by real-live seventh graders.

But before I jump into the quotes that, for so many reasons, brought tears to my eyes, I thought I should state, for the record, that there are a lot of very intelligent 7th graders in this state. 7th graders who wrote things like...

“Sadly, I cannot rewrite history with this pen.”

Some kids showed creativity and forethought. “I would change things so that Leonardo Davinci was born in modern times. With all of our modern technology, who knows what he could have done. We might have time travel machines or teleporters. But if he hadn’t have been born back then and learned all that stuff about the anatomy, we all might have died from diseases a long time ago, so maybe I wouldn’t change that.”

“I would go back and stop money from being invented. I would change that because I think the world would be better if we just traded for services.”

“I would change Martin Luther King Day to ‘Feel Good About Yourself Day’. I think he would like that more.”

“I would stop the wheel from being invented… then we would have flying cars.”

Of course, this post would be a lot less fun if I were to focus on those truly insightful essays. So please enjoy the following quotes, and try not to think about how these kids are going to be running the world in a few years.

Many kids decided to write about events in their own personal history...

“I am going to tell you about a major milestone in my life: my first head injury.”

“In this essay I will tell you about the personal event I would change. It is the night I was too scared to go to the bathroom.”

“I would go back and change the time I broke my femur and my elbow. I didn’t get to see my friends for three months! At one time, I got so bored I thought about reading.”

“My reaction to finding out that Santa wasn’t real was shocking!”

“I wish my insulin system hadn’t gone insane and had just been a good little vital organ.”

Last year, the number one topic was dead grandparents and, although there weren’t nearly as many this year, we didn’t escape them entirely.

Some were sweet: “Not having a second grandpa is like only having half a heart.”

And others were, well… a little disturbing. “I would change my grandpa’s death. I mean, he had smoked for like 50 years, so we knew he was going to die. I just wish it hadn’t of been in that fire. I would have told him not to fall asleep smoking. Then his cigarette would never have fallen on his oxygen tank.”

Other kids wrote outside their own experience.

“I think we should change the invention of drugs. I heard about this guy once, in a mental hospital because of LSD. He thought he was an orange and every time the doctor or nurse came to check on him, he ran away because he thought they were trying to peel him.”

There were quite a few essays with political themes. Of course, the brain of a typical 7th grader doesn't have a whole lot of storage space for actual political knowledge, so the essays ended up full of "facts" like this...
“Another reason John McCain would have been a good choice is his vice president would have been Hillary Clinton. They would have made this a better place to live.”

There was also a lot of, what we are going to politely refer to as '7th Grade Revisionist History'...

One kidlet wrote that he/she would get rid of “the NASA” because “once Lance Armstrong went to the moon, there wasn’t any point to going back.”

More 7th Grade "Historical Information"...

“I would change Abe Lincoln’s death. Yeah, we all knew he was going to die some day, but he didn’t have to be murdered. He was important before he died because he was the 14th president of the United States and he signed the declaration of independence.”

“Lincoln was killed in his favorite movie theater.”

"I would go back in time and stop President Lincoln's assignation (he details how he is going to save the president, then concludes...) After he was done thanking me, I would tell him, 'You know how I just saved your life? Well, if you wanted to do something to thank me, you could lower the driving age to 13.' And because I saved him he would totally do it.

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“Think of all the good Abraham Lincoln could have done if he hadn’t been killed. He changed the ‘Slavery is OK’ law to be the ‘no slavery’ law and he might have modified other laws, like ‘no littering’ to ‘absolutely no littering’.”

There were sooooo many essays about World War II, wherein we fought the “Natzies”, the “Nautsies”, the “Nazeys”, the “Naughtzees”, and even a Nazi or two.

One kid said World War II was in the 1960’s, another dated it in 1912.

“Hitler was a small man, but he made big trouble for Germany.”

“First of all, I would like to announce that I think Hitler was just a plain, flat jackass.”

“My friend is a Jew, so if he was alive during that time period, he would be dead.

One kid wrote two pages about how to avoid World War II. His solution? “All school and work should have been canceled so people could stay home and eat ice-cream and listen to the radio that day. Then everybody would have been in a good mood and not wanted to fight.”

“We lost World War II. That made President Roosevelt so depressed, he had to go in a wheelchair for the rest of his life.”

“If I could change something in the past, I would kill Hitler. I would stop him from killing all of the Jews. I would stop him because my cat is a Jew.”

One very articulate kiddo wanted to prevent Twilight from being written. His closing argument was that it printing all of the books was bad for the environment. “Did anyone ask Papa Tree if they could cut down his kids and write tales of vampire love all over their insides?... In my opinion, the Twilight books could be the cause of our specie’s demise.”

Winner of the 2009 Best Title Award: The Slutter! (the essay was about the senseless “slutter” of the buffalo by the white settlers.)

Winner of the 2009 Best Closing Award: “So that is a part of my life I would like to relive. But I think next time, I will change my brother into a girl. That would be a dream come true.”

And they wouldn't be 7th grade papers without a few... Spelling Mistakes
“The Silver War was where one part of the United States fought agent the other part.”

“The Hellicost was wrong in so many ways.”

“So many inecent people were killed in World War II.

Hitler was just “so cold bludded.”

One darling thought the correct spelling of peaceful was “pissful”.

One kid wrote about his uncle’s “mamorial service”. Which got me wondering… if a memorial service is held in a church, would a mamorial service be held at Hooters?

If you enjoyed these 7th graders musings, stay tuned for more of my favorites, including excerpts from what is quite possibly the best essay ever written about hamsters.

To be continued...

A Few Random Thoughts and a Moment of Clarity

Well, I'm back in Boise gearing up for another marathon essay grading session. About fifty of my fellow 7th Grade English teachers, including my mother and I, flock to the state capital each January to grade about 40,000 two-page essays in 3 days. And if you don't think that sounds like a blast, you haven't read This Post.

But with a yearbook deadline that had to be meet, an institute lesson that had to taught, three days of sub plans to prepare, and the first of many ward conferences to participate in, my brain hasn't been functioning at peak performance levels. Hence this post of random musings that have popped into my head over the course of the week.

Random Thought #1: I have decided that I am going to give all of my exercising buddies swim caps for their birthdays this year. Not the sleek, Speedo swim caps. The old school Esther Williams kind of swim caps. And I will expect them to wear those caps every morning as we swim laps this summer. And I will expect them to wink like the chick in the bottom picture.

Random Thought #2: Since redecorating my room with a nautical theme to match the novel we are currently reading, the kidlets bathroom pass usage has quadrupled. Is is coincidence or the power of suggestion? I think I will ask the science teachers to do some kind of experiment to determine what, if any, impact images of flowing water have on 7th grade bladders or the piddle-control section of their brains.


Random Thought #3: I need to start writing clearer notes to myself because, if I were to get hit by a bus, who ever came to clear out my desk would be very confused and slightly concerned.

Random Thought #4: Brother Roskelly and Krystal have been walking at 5 a.m. just as much as I have, and yet their backsides are significantly smaller. I don't know if I can be friends with them anymore.

Random Thought #5: I was totally wrong about my Project Runway auf wiedersehen prediction (crazy lady came in second, REALLY?!?!?), but I think Tim Gunn should come teach home EC at my school so that we can be best friends. I could totally overlook the fact that his backside is smaller than mine.

Random Thought #6: I have really, really good friends. Friends for whom I will purchase large amounts of Cabela's fudge in what I'm sure will be a futile attempt at evening out the backside ratio when we hang out.

Random Thought #7: If I don't get to bed soon, I might fall asleep mid-essay tomorrow and drool all over the kidlet's papers.

Random Thought #8: Moose Drool is my favorite flavor of Cabela's fudge.

Moment of Clarity: Less Moose Drool would make for a smaller backside which would make for more friends. More friends I could pressure into wearing dorky swim caps in public.

Random Thought #9: Next season Project Runway should have a swim cap design challeng and Tim Gunn should model.

Random Thought #10: I am pretty sure I am going to dream of a swim-cap-wearing Tim Gunn tonight. And I bet Tim will totally "make it work."

Random Thought #11: Ending this list of random thoughts on number eleven would be pretty random. I should totally do that. . . Right after I blow up the ship for Alex.

Variations on a Disturbing Theme

Saturday morning, I woke up and got ready for the yearbook staff's first Saturday workday. I said my prayers, fixed my hair, got dressed, and ate breakfast.

I eventually left my apartment, locked the door, and walked down the steps and across the lawn to my car. I said a silent prayer of thanks that there was no frost to scrape off the windshield, unlocked the car door, climbed in, and put the key in the ignition.

Then I put the car in first-gear, checked my mirrors, and started to flip a U-turn.

And then I stopped.

In the middle of the road.

Because I saw this...

Yep.

They're heads. In the back of a truck. Across the street from my home.

So I did what anyone in a similar situation would do: I took some photos and drove away.

We had a lot to do before our yearbook deadline, so I didn't think anymore about it for the rest of the morning. Or that afternoon. Or even that evening.

But then today I had a meeting at the ward building located three houses down from my apartment.

As I was leaving I saw this...

Yep.

It's a head. So.... at what point do I start worrying? How many disembodied heads within 100 yards of my residence in a 28 hour period do I ignore before they become a concern?

I mean , I don't want to lose my head over this if it isn't a big deal. I'd hate to fall head over heals into a quagmire of worry, but I also don't want to hide my head in the sand if some sort of action needs to be taken. So if you have any thoughts, even ones just off the top of your head, please give me a heads up.

But now, if you will excuse me, I think it is time for me to be heading off to bed.

Thank you, and good night.

A Few Thoughts on Natural Selection in the BJHS Bobcat Population

A few weeks before Christmas, some weather came through these parts.

The wet and cold kind of weather.

By some strange twist of fate, the wet, cold weather actually came and went before I had any kind of outside "duty". But it left behind a bunch of ice that stuck around until it was my turn to patrol the bus zone for a week in an attempt ensure no kidlets were squished.
I spent all that week trying to convince the kidlets that playing on the ice was a bad idea.

Well, that's not entirely true.

The truer statement is that I spent most of that week trying to convince the kidlets that playing on the ice was a bad idea. I spent the rest of that week helping teary-eyed kidlets limp back into the building so they could get ice packs to ice down their ice-induced injuries.

Every day, right after the 3:15 bell, I told the same herd of kidlets that they would get hurt if they kept playing on the ice. They paid me no heed... no heed at all... and continued playing until the 3:30 bell when, without fail, one of their comrades in arms would succumb to the laws of physics and prove my much-repeated (and just as much ignored) point. The sight of one of their own trying to hold back tears of pain was the only thing that could convince them to stay off the ice.

And that only lasted until the next day's 3:15 bell. Then the whole sad scene would be repeated.

Flash-forward to today, our first day back at school after Christmas break.

Once again, Weather had seen fit to cover large chunks of the school grounds with ice. Likewise, the kidlets had once again seen fit to use that ice in their misguided attempts to massacre themselves...I mean to have fun.

As soon as I left the building, I saw them running and slipping and scooting and sliding.

I immediately opened my mouth to holler some words of warning and of prohibition.

Then I remembered how poorly my sage advice had been received before the break.

Then I remembered the process of natural selection.

And then I accepted a snack-sized Snickers bar from a trustworthy kidlet, and sat back to watch nature do its best to thin the herd.

I have to admit that I felt very at peace with my decision to let the ice-related consequences flow as freely as the ice-related runoff flowed from the roof of the school.

In fact, I was feeling so in tune with Mother Nature's way of tweaking the gene pool, I didn't even remind the kidlets that the janitorial staff had waxed the floor outside of my classroom over the break.

Granted, I may regret my chosen course of action midway through the week after a few lunch periods spent mopping up splattered 7th graders from frozen basketball courts and freshly mopped floors.

And there is a very good chance that by Wednesday afternoon I will back sounding a voice of warning, heeded or not, because I really do care about the knuckle heads...

... and because I have a tendency to faint at the sight of blood.

But mostly because I care about the knuckleheads.