pardon my gush

There are times when teaching makes me feel like I'm dying but there are times like now where it is so, completely worth it. Like tonight, when I just finished reading 20 rather spectacular student papers. We read Extremely Close & Incredibly Loud and I was astounded (though I shouldn't have been) at how much my students loved it. I didn't want to do a boring analytical paper so I asked them to channel the characters' styles in one of two ways: 1) Write a "Stuff that happened to me" like Oskar's, only have it be about your life using Oskar-style-techniques (inventions, blocked dialogue, imagination, precocity, etc.) or 2) Write a letter from the grandfather to the grandmother and one from the grandmother to the grandfather saying everything you think should be said. I know I did this last semester, but I was just so utterly delighted with how these turned out that I had to share some of the highlights:

My snarkiest (and smartest) student included snapshots of graffiti on her favorite bridge. Among them: "Abby will you marry me?" "Michelle, I love you and I hope we are together as long as these bridges are here. Larry." "To the love I hope to find -Jacob."

My jock-iest student gave me this lovely meditation: "I would go home, tell my grandma "I'm here for you,: and tell my parents and my little sister "I love you." I think the word love is what separates us as human beings from everything else on earth. We are capable of this emotion of attachment and care that no other species can have. I want everybody to be able to tell their loved ones that they love them."

My laziest student gave me this: "If I had another life, we would live in a tiny house inside a piano. We would live on one string and someone would start to play the most beautiful song in the world. We would live happily as hammers fell all around us hitting different notes until one day the pianist would reach the best part of the song and play the string we lived on. Our house would be crushed by our string's hammer and we would be killed. But we would die knowing we were part of something beautiful." [!!!!!!!!!!!!?????? amazing]

And yes, of course, I cried and cried, I was so proud and pleased.