honest like a mirror

so it turns out i did not magically fight off my sore throat. it has been slowly beating me into submission. i took off of work two days last week and rested, then it got better. then saturday i ventured outside. then it got worse again. then sunday i spent the day on the couch reading, and it got better again. then i went to work the past two days, and now it is bad again. why? why, i ask you? i won't even tell you about the "mucus incident" this morning. you don't want to know.

hold on a sec ... gotta go check on my cookies. i'm baking oatmeal chocolate chip cookies instead of writing my novel (which, might i add everyone in my class LOVES. the novel, not the cookies. although i may bring cookies tomorrow)

ah! still not done!

anyway, not much is going on ... writing, getting sick, hanging out with the kiddies ... same old stuff. but yesterday we did something very interesting. i don't know how it came about, but somehow my assistant and i were talking with the kids and they mentioned that they wanted to have "debates." so we said, "ok, let's have debates." so yesterday we did something that we named "great debates." pretty much, i looked up middle school debate club topics on the internets and came up with some issues that the kids could debate about. stuff like "should junk food be banned in schools" and "should field trips be educational" and "should violent video games be banned" etc etc. anyway, the kids got pretty into it. they debated really well, and after the all had one-on-one debates they asked if they could make "debate teams." so then we broke the kids up into teams of four and had them compete in teams for one final topic.

(cookies are done. man they're good. i'm so domestical)

anyway, the kids did a really good job. we have these two kids from africa that have been coming in. they just moved here and they're really smart thoughtful kids. the only problem is that the boy has a serious stuttering problem. i'm not sure about the etiquette with stuttering, but i've heard that you're supposed to just let the person keep going and not interrupt them. so i let this kid stutter through what he's going to say and he usually has something ver profound to say. but his stutter is REALLY bad so i wind up translating for the other kids. anyway, we had a little problem with some kids laughing while this kid was trying to debate. but i called them out and i think it was ok.

then my favorite kid had a little trouble understanding the idea behind debating. he kind of wanted to argue both the pros and cons of each topic. which, in real life, is good. we SHOULD look at both sides of each issue closely. but you do have to choose one side when debating. he didn't care for that too much.

that, dear blog readers, is what i have been up to as of late. and i will leave you with a poem that my stuttering child wrote during one of our poetry month program. i think it's pretty deep:

roses are red
violets are blue
i am honest
like a mirror