It's probably worth taking the briefest of moments, since I can't sleep anyway, to describe something pretty cool about my school.

For the most part, I'm not really able to brag about my kids in the way you can, Steph. Many of them mean well, yes, and some of their abilities are even acceptable, but I can't count on them to buy in to anything we do in class. For the most part, I have to trick them into learning. One of the more well meaning kids today even asked me, "When are we going to be writing essays and stuff?" I smiled, because they all had half an essay on their papers already. They were just used to somebody telling them, "Write an essay", and I had tricked them into it. Muahahaha!

But there is one kid for whom this just wasn't working. In a regular school, Natalie would be in honors classes--not for her hard work or her natural ability, but for both. This technique of mine was driving her batty. The frustration on her face when we do things like grammar dice or whatever was piercing, and she really deserved something better. This is where I became really impressed with my school.

I took her aside after class last week and visited the principal with her. I explained the situation, and asked Rhett if we could do an independent study. That's right, an independent study. It blew my mind when he said yes. I now meet with her for a half an hour after school twice a week and give her reading and writing assignments that she simply does on her own. At our first meeting last Thursday, I asked what she liked to read, trying to decide what kind of class we wanted it to be, and she said her favorite book was Rain of Gold by Victor Villasenor. We talked about that book--which I have read and enjoyed--and decided that if she liked that, she should read A Hundred Years of Solitude. Seriously. She is reading AHOS for the next two weeks, and doing projects about it as we go. This is seriously the greatest event of my life right now. AHOS is like one of the greatest books ever written, and I would never get to teach it in a high school class, even in an honors class, because it is soo looong. And she says it's only going to take her two weeks, after which I think I'm going to have her read Fateless by Imre Kertesz. If I wasn't a lazy writer, I would go back and add the fact that we decided to make it a Multicultural Lit class in the part where that information belongs, but meh.