Story Time Success

I may have mentioned once or twice that I teach high school.

I love this job.

Kids keep you on your toes, and normal adults are so boringly well-behaved.

I have a Spanish 1 class late in the day. This week we were learning "la mochila" (the backpack). In preparation for the lesson, I had packed one of M's backpacks with some typical and not so typical items that one might find in a high-schooler's backpack: el lápiz, el bolígrafo, el cuaderno, la carpeta, etc. The kids would guess what was in the backpack in English, and I would look inside to see if the item was in there. If it was, I would remove it, set it on the marker tray (what used to be a chalk tray), and label it.

Included in my backpack was ¨el libro¨ . When a student guessed that there might be a book in my backpack, I reached in and pulled out the book I am currently carrying around: Think like a Pancreas.

One of my students could probably have moved on to Spanish 2, but was a little shaky and ended up taking Spanish 1. He does a lot of doodling in his notebook as a result. At the end of class, he handed me a story that he wrote when he should have been copying the vocabulary into his notebook.

The Pancreas That Wanted To

             Once upon a time there was a little girl. Her name was Victoriabby-Devon-Charlie-the great. But they called her Devon for short. She had diabetes. She was very sick from it, and all of a sudden the pancreas didn't work. So she has to take insulin, because her pancreas couldn't. Devon went to the doctors and the doctor said "your pancreas is being silly" to her. All of a sudden her pancreas woke up, like sleeping beauty. It didn't like being called silly, so it wanted to produce insulin but couldn't. When Devon went to the drs. to get more insulin, but her pancreas only wanted its own type of insulin, so it tried and tried, and some just came out! The insulin from the doctors mixed with the real insulin from the pancreas, and the mixture caused a reaction, and the reaction got rid of diabetes forever. Then, Victoriabby-Devon-Charly-the-great lived happily ever after.

                                                                       THE END

I promise you that this is exactly what he wrote. I had to work very hard not to edit it.

All of my students know that M has diabetes. I try to give the kids a rudimentary understanding of what it means to have diabetes. When I read this unassigned piece of written literature, I thought that it showed some tiny level of success.

Not because this fourteen-year-old could construct flawless sentences, and not because he got all of his facts straight.

I felt success because he knew what a pancreas was. He knew what insulin was. And he understands the dream of a diabetic is for a quick cure.

Now if only M's pancreas would grow tired of being called silly. THEN we might see some results!