Them Write

I've told my students many times how much I enjoy watching them write.  I mean it: the calm, the beauty, knowing that for a moment maybe they're going someplace that belongs only to them.  So in all my classes I ask them to keep journals, usually a series of entries following prompts I come up with.  I'll do an entry at the same time, but I like to put my pen down and listen.  It's a humbling kind of thing, this sense that for a moment we're at play on the fields of language, so to speak.

I also keep a blooper file.  Here's the latest entry: Once dead, you have to gut and skin the animal.  I'll run this by the class tomorrow, first saluting their (anonymous) classmate for beginning the sentence with a modifier instead of, as usual, the grammtical subject.  Come to think of it, I might use this line in 20 minutes when I go into my creative writing class, saying, as a prompt, what else do you have to do once dead?