The Book Report

I'm pretty sure that one of the few bright spots in the life of a Reading teacher is to assign book reports.  This is clearly their method of revenge on classes full of kids that talk, pop gum, text, disrupt and otherwise annoy them during the early part of the year.

Little Smoot's reading teacher took this form of revenge to an even greater level this year by making her class's reports due on the day they returned from Christmas break.  Merry Christmas children!

Normally Little Smoot does a good job of getting homework finished promptly.  In fact, that's our rule.  It's the first thing she does as soon as she gets home from school, so she doesn't have to worry about it later.

Well, it was a little harder to motivate her to get this particular project done, particularly when she could spend more time playing the Wii while basking in the glow of the Christmas tree.  I was pestering her every day about this stupid book report, and telling her how I really didn't want her to put it off, and her answer was always, "I will!"

Naturally, a couple days before returning to school she realized that she had managed to lose the instructions for what all had to be done for this project.  She called a friend, and got all of these details, which included a diorama, summary, a word find consisting of vocabulary words from the book, and a bunch of other stuff.  I am surprised she didn't have to do a one-on-one in-person interview with the author, or some such thing.

After shedding some number of tears, realizing that she had no idea where to begin (and I'm sure I didn't help with the number of "told-ya-so" comments I made), she was literally up late the final night of vacation to get the stupid thing done.

She finally got her project back this week, and we were happy that she got a 94 out of 100 on it.  Apparently other kids in the class weren't so lucky.  Most of her class did terribly, and several kids didn't bother doing it at all, and Little Smoot's teacher told the class (this is an actual quote, according to Little Smoot), "I wanted to kill myself while grading these things!"

So I guess we'll be happy with the 94.  I can hardly wait until they start assigning her science projects, like making her build a fully functional volcano, or whatever.