At the end of every quarter we have a “Writer’s Circle” (except for the second quarter-- I forgot it then). This time the journal readings were even better. The thought-provoking ones were more deep, the poems more delightful, and the humorous stories more funny.
My favorites this time included the following stories:
a little brother running into a glass door,
what students did on their rare Texas snow day,
a pilot landing his plane in Zurich (a strange combination of a student’s journal assignment on hat day [he wore a pilot’s hat] and our Anabaptist history class,
a commentary on a vivid Civil War photograph,
a beautiful poem from a literature assignment,
thoughts on sermons and Anabaptist doctrine,
a day in the life of an explorer,
what to do if you were lost in the woods,
and how a sixteen-year-old young lady got in trouble when she was four after her family had moved to Mexico.
All of these were from writing assignments they had done for either English class, or a daily journal entry in which I give them a topic. The first year we did this they could have never read their writing aloud, but, this is the third year we’ve done it, and their writing just keeps getting better and better. A small reward for persistence and diligence.