TAKS essay prompt: A time you were encouraged by someone

Yesterday evening, a couple colleagues and I met up at Starbucks to go over our copies of the students' TAKS essays. While that may not seem like the most exciting activity for a Saturday night (ok fine, who am I kidding...I have no life), it actually ended up being a really enjoyable chat - mainly because it was a lot of gossip. Things that I found out included: unethical strategies (like failing all the students) that will make that teacher look better later on; a lot of married teachers are having affairs; another English teacher (who obviously wasn't there) dated a student's older brother and then took out her anger over the break-up by failing the student; insight into a lottttt of politics. Also, apparently the math department has this big beef with the English department, for a lot of petty reasons, and are just waiting for us to fail. Wait a second, isn't this job supposed to be about the STUDENTS...?

Besides the gossip, I just have to say I am really lucky to be working with these two women. Mrs. H. is like that really caring mother-figure who takes care of everybody. She also has this great vision of how the department should be organized and is also genuinely there to TEACH the STUDENTS. Ms. M., my department chair, is this wonderfully blunt Caribbean girl with a hilariously dry sense of humor and fierce attitude. She's like my really cool big sister that enlightens me to the "real" stuff, and isn't afraid to speak her mind.

While my kids' TAKS essays still do not necessarily live up to the expectations of a 10th grader's writing, I have to say...I was impressed. I have never seen so many paragraph indentations, proper usages of punctuation, correct uses of subject-verb agreement, and examples of figurative language. Ha, that's the one message I realized my students took to heart: use figurative language to make your writing more interesting!

Some hilarious examples to come....

Excerpt from Andrew's essay:

"A time someone encouraged me was six weeks ago. When I was getting ready for my TAKS test. My teacher Ms. Chen keep me going in class with the work so I could pass the test with flying colors.

I had started to hate going to her class because of all the work she started to give us. but it was paying off because I was getting better at writting and better going my stories. it was just going good. I was going to Saturday scoool and after school work with Ms. Chen nothing could stop me from passing that test. I just knew I was gone pass because I worked so hard and many of my teachers were pushing me and the other kids in the school."