I know.
Still, when someone asks me, "Do you have kids?" I'm always tempted to say, "Yes. Twenty-three of them." I have twenty-three students who I see more hours per week than their parents do. I see them more than I see my husband. Some of them I'm teaching for the third year in a row. So when I say that they are my kids, I really mean it. I love them. Only a fellow teacher can understand this love, and even then I'd say that only a fellow teacher who's looped with a class for three years can really get it. They're my babies. I've helped raise them. I've watched them grow up. And yesterday? Yesterday I was really, really proud of them.
My top class has ten students in it, aged 13-15. This year they all participated in NaNoWriMo ("National Novel Writing Month" for those of you who don't know what that is). It's a challenge to write an entire novel in the month of November. I told my students they could try to write full novels if they wished, but I teamed up with each of them to set a novella word count goal. We're compiling all of their novellas into a self-published anthology once the edits are made. Four of my students told me that they wanted to go for the full novel challenge, which is 30,000 words in a month. That's an average of FOUR PAGES A DAY, EVERY DAY, ALL MONTH LONG. I told them absolutely, that they should go for it, but we set their "official" word count goals as lower, something I saw as more attainable.
I am blown away by these kids. All four who set out to write the full novels accomplished that goal. We're going out for lunch on Friday to celebrate. According to the NaNoWriMo conditions, these four students now get their novels formatted and published for free, so look for them on Amazon.com in the next few months. Even the students who didn't do the full novels wrote fantastic novellas, and the shortest one was thirty pages (no ten-page college paper will look daunting now!). Not only did they hit these word count goals, but they wrote GREAT stories. We had so much fun doing lessons on effective plot diagrams, building believable characters, how to write snappy dialogue, etc. The students had fun, and I obviously love this stuff. Writing is my life. One day I offered to stay after school until six to have a "writing party" with whomever wanted to stay, and nine out of ten decided to stay and write. We conferenced with each other, bounced ideas off of each other, and overall had a great and productive time. It was like we were a writing team and I was the coach. These kids learned so much, accomplished so much, and I could not possibly be prouder of them.
Yesterday, December 1, we decided to have a party because November (and therefore NaNoWriMo) was finally over. The kids brought in some delicious food, we played games, and I kicked off the whole thing with a speech about how I've never felt prouder of a class and how I was blown away by how dedicated and disciplined they were to accomplish these huge things with each other's help and encouragement. Every time I heard someone say, "I don't know if I'm going to make this full goal..." there would be at least five kids saying, "You can do it! You've come this far! I know you can make it to the end!" I mean, it was amazing. A couple of them had tears in their eyes (and I'm not saying I did...but I'm not saying I didn't). After my speech, one of the girls said, "Well...we have something for you too..."
What?
She said, "We wanted to thank you for pushing us and believing in us, so we made you this card." The card below was signed by all of my students (but I'm not posting that part because I can't put their names online). I was so touched. Have YOU ever thanked a teacher for making you write a thirty page paper? Ha ha... me neither. I've got an amazing group of students.
Did I mention how much I love these kids? And how stinking proud I am to have four more published authors to add to the list of students I've taught? Yep. Pretty proud.
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