Today and tomorrow I'm doing revision lessons. It was fascinating.

I think I did ok. I'd give myself a B for the overall holding their attention, having a relevant lesson, engaging at their level, and eliciting their ideas instead of telling them what to do. Frankly, that's the best I can hope for given I've never worked with this group of students before, let alone this age group.

I think I was at my best giving a dramatic reading of the poem. They dug the parts where Rose was bad. I'm also very very good at working with students individually. That's always been my forte.

I was fascinated by their work. They had no figurative language and few sensory details. Just spending time stretching a moment--what were you wearing? who drove the car? what did your elbows do--jumped their poems to a new level. They did have great small objects to work with--a sea shell, fireworks. I'm still trying to figure out the boy who wanted to write about eyeballs. I kept probing how eyeballs made him feel, and we finally got "Eyeballs are awesome. They see legos." I thought it was a good start, but I told him I wanted seven more things they saw.

I was also fascinated by the teachers. In the first classroom, the teacher stepped back and let me do my thing, but in the second one, she basically cotaught the lesson with me. I was amazed at the number of strategies she had for positive discipline. I would like to sit at her feet and learn classroom management. This, by the way, was teacher Rose had last year.