My 8th grade English teacher was a genius and the laziest man alive. He called his class Reading and Writing Workshop, and we would spend the entire class period either sitting quietly at our desks writing or reading. Our peers would grade our writing. And we had to keep a log of our reading and turn it in fortnightly to prove that we didn't spend our class time sleeping. He effectively did nothing, but he did provide us an uninterrupted hour of reading or writing every day, so for that I thank him. I don't remember anything that I read or wrote, but I remember my desk mate reading the entire canon of Choose Your Own Adventure books. He would read the first page of each book and be faced with a choice: one wise option led to continuing the adventure, and one option so absurd in its stupidity that no rational child would ever choose it -- it would lead to instant death and the end of the book. He was a smart guy, but always chose instant death, and then he would document it in his reading log as if he'd read an entire 100-page book. He would sleep the remainder of class. I looked him up on Facebook the other day and now he's a teacher. I hope it's an English class.
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