Friday, April 25, 2008

Sharpening Pencils

Today I covered middle school Spanish (a class I usually avoid since I took the wrong language when I was in school) and their assignment was one of those vocab color-and-sentence things (I've seen a lot of this sort of activity). It was a pretty straightforward day.

It was 5th period, and this one boy was spending way too much time at the pencil sharpener. I was just about to make a snarky comment about that pencil being beyond hope when I looked at what he was doing. He was sharpening all of his colored pencils. I was glad I held my tongue. As the assignment included coloring in pictures, what the boy was doing was completely reasonable. (Although, another student did comment upon how long this sharpening took.)

The boy went back to his seat (and the other boy got up to sharpen his pencil--only one this time), and then he raised his hand. He asked me, "Can I use markers for this assignment?"

Me: "You spent all that time sharpening your pencils, and now you want to use markers?"

I guess I should have made that snarky comment after all.

No comments:

Post a Comment

I appreciate your comments.

I respond to comments* via email, unless your profile email is not enabled. Then, I'll reply in the comment thread. Eventually. Probably.

*Exception: I do not respond to "what if?" comments, but I do read them all. Those questions are open to your interpretation, and I don't wish to limit your imagination by what I thought the question was supposed to be.