It's essay writing season! Yay... I have a love hate relationship with essays. I hate them because they're so awful to read and I love them because they're so awful to read. It always baffles me how bad they write as 9th graders. I mean, it's awful. While we were looking over some essays written by 10th graders for the English II SAPT, one student noticed that the writer used quite a few contractions. She knew this was wrong and let us know. "You can't have no contraptions in your essay!" You're right young grasshopper, you can't have any contraptions.
Below are some real examples from real essays written by real 9th graders. Basically, the topic is something along the lines of do you think it's a good idea for schools to have an open campus policy that would allow students to leave campus during their lunch periods. Here goes!
"I think leaving for lunch would be a bad thing because kids could get in troble or not want to com back to school."
"There are good and bad thing's. good things is get away from the school adn teachers and the trouble makers."
"Bad things is kids can go home some weed get high and come to school and get in troble or two people have a dissagrement and meet up somewhere and box."
"I do not think this will never happen."
"Students can go to innapropriate places during their lunch periods. They could go to tattoo and piercings shops."
"The open-campus policy is a policy giving teens the choise to leave campus during lunch time."
"The paragraphs are going to be on open-campus policy. Paragraphs are going to be ideas on how its good. I will give examples, just to show you. Its going to show you how leaving campus for lunch, it good." "The paragraphs are good and on topic."
"This is an outrage! The principle just stated that our school, Terry High, will start having open-campus policy allowing us to leave the campus for lunch. Its obvious he do not know the problems that this will cause to the school."
Ok, I can't take anymore. These are for real from my kids' essays. Sigh... I'll be posting more tomorrow when I'm not sad. LOL
Today I was a little sad because I missed my granny. Because I'm fairly light skinned it was obvious that I had been crying. My sweet coworkers cried with me and my kids knew something was wrong. I didn't tell them what was wrong but they just knew. While I was sitting at my desk in a daze, one of my kids, who knew how close I was to Granny and had sent Granny cards while she was in the hospital, came up to my desk.
Kid: "It's one of those days, huh?"
Me: "Yeah."
Kid: "I understand. I had a lot of those days when my grandfather died. It does get better."
I just looked at her. We understood each other. It's amazing how your kids just know what to say to make things better. After that a few of my kids made up excuses so they could come to my room and check on me. It was really sweet. Makes me love what I do that much more. Yay kids!
