Scratch TFA’s Teaching as Leadership model. I hereby subscribe to Teaching as Praying. Praying in the non-religious, only in times of desperation, danger or want.

I caught myself praying as I was writing a self-checklist for my students to wrap up this persuasive unit. As a final check for their editorial, I’m going to ask students to go back to their rough drafts and count how many paragraphs they have and write the # in a space: ____ Then, in a moment of desperation and panic, I added next to the blank “<—-If this number isn’t 5, see me.”

And then, I started laughing and couldn’t stop. I realized what I had written was so absurd. I was thinking to myself, God, I hope it’s 5. Please don’t write 3 or 2 or 4. 5 paragraphs please. 5 is the magic number. That’s the only gift I could really appreciate from my kids. Something to affirm that I know what I’m doing slightly. I marvel that by the end of this week or Monday, all students will have written their first persuasive essay, and that I can say I moved 91 students to write a 5 paragraph essay. Hopefully, complete with introductions, opinion statements, topic sentences, supporting reasons, supporting details and a conclusion. It will be clunky, but if the frame is good the body will undoubtedly get better. Mechanics! Literally. The college writing center tutoring definitely doesn’t compare to this.

On another note, Christmas break is approaching and riding on the tailwind is the January ELA state test. Another thing that warrants me to mentally bless myself and mutter a plaintive, “oh jesus” as my pupils dilate and my hands get sweaty. Too descriptive. I got carried away. But the test is scary. And Jesus’ birthday is indeed coming up. A flight home, a 10 day break, and a suitcase full of not 4, not 3, but 5 paragraph essays.