REPOST: The 2009 DWA, Part 1

Back in the day, all the kids in the state of Idaho wrote essays for the state direct writing assessment, hereafter referred to as "the DWA."

When our state started having serious budget issues, the DWA became one of the first casualties of the education cuts, hereafter referred to as "the reason I cry myself to sleep three nights a week."

After we lost the state test, my school district, hereafter referred to as "awesome", stepped up and provided an opportunity for us to have a district wide DWA.

This district assessment, while providing awesome data on the kidlet's writing abilities, has failed to provide me with the same quality and quantity of hilarious blog material that the near 20,000 state essays did. What a sad, unforeseen effect of budget cuts, eh?

So, because it is DWA week, and because my kidlets are far to brilliant to make enough funny errors to fill a blog post, I have decided to re-post some some of my posts from past DWA's.

Here is the first one:

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?

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.

&

“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...