Wednesday, December 07, 2005

a conversation with trenton

Setting: 7th period geography class where the students are researching in partners for a state book project. They have to find out a bunch of information about a state that I assigned them, and then make a state book. (I did not make the assignment--just doing what I'm told. I would change the assignment drastically if I were in charge, but I'm not.) We have a set of 20 laptops so that they can research online in the classroom. On Tuesday we discussed the importance of summarizing rather than plagiarizing information.

Characters:

Miss Den Boer, the much loved student teacher who will soon be retiring from her role.

Trenton, who recently wrote the following letter to Miss Den Boer: "To Miss Den Boer. I don't really want you to leave. You are the best student teacher ever." (Well, I told them to write me a letter if they finished early . . . . )

Jake: probably the jolliest person I've ever met. Also incredibly hard to keep on task.

Scene 1:
Trenton: "Miss Den Boer, can I copy and paste this information into my state book?"
Miss Den Boer: "No Trenton, you can't. If you did, what would that be?"
Trenton: "um . . . " Trenton scratches his head for a couple seconds, "pornography?"
Miss Den Boer laughs uncontrollably while Trenton looks a little embarassed until he figures out that he should have said plagiarism, at which point he turns quite red. Jake gladly joins in the merriment.


Kids. Ya gotta love them.

4 comments:

Andrea said...

You are making me very excited to student teach middle schoolers....

Gabriel Florit said...

is sarah still alive?

Sara said...

when does will this play be published/ performed?

Kids are fantastic. We should all be like them.

Margaret said...

Nope, she died. :)