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Someone to Have on Your Speechwriting Team
I’m recuperating tonight from two and a half days of subbing in a fourth-grade classroom. There were some struggles, but it mostly went well. There were lots of vivid moments that are satisfying to remember. For example, the students were assigned to take a position on an issue from an argument feature of Scholastic News, then give reasons to back up their claim. They completed this in teams, and voted on one team member to go up to the front and present their conclusions. (It was cute to see one team that kept raising their hands. I’d go over there, and then realize that they were just voting.) The kids elected to speak did a great job, for the most part standing up straight, looking at the audience, and speaking in complete sentences.
One reserved little girl gave an unexpected argument in defense of keeping the penny that charmed the socks off me. I asked her if she had seen it in the Scholastic issue, since the “for” and “against” items are written by kids. Nope, it was her own, she corrected me in her quiet way. See, Ricochet members, if we get rid of the penny, we are losing out, because finding a penny is good luck. We won’t have these serendipitous discoveries anymore if we coldheartedly pull these one-cent pieces out of circulation. So put that in your pipe and smoke it.
I told her that I loved her argument. Not because it was logical, but because it was poetic. I didn’t expect it, and it got me thinking about how it appealed to a different side of me–it appealed to my feelings. It changed the tenor of the conversation.
Published in Education
I also had to go back and re-read it. Wondering what the kids did to make you cry!
Cute story.
But I always throw my pennies away.
You do realize it’s an island with a past, don’t you?
Just a wise crack on my part.