One of the greatest joys and the biggest pains of being a teacher is grading the neverending stream of papers and writings that students have to turn in. I'm awful at time management and I get so frustrated by the grammatical errors that I usually end up giving up after about an hour. But every now and again, I get a handful of assignments that are actually entertaining - intentionally or not - and I just have to share them.

I'm currently walled up in my classroom, taking advantage of an 11th grade test day to get some waaaaay overdue grading done. At the moment, I am reading through the "Moment in Time" papers that I mentioned a few weeks ago, and I've had a few gems, including the story of one student's first girlfriend who he had for four whole hours, a frightening tale of being chased through a park by a gang member with a gun, and two stories about cruises.

AND THEN THERE WAS THIS.

At first, I was laughing at the number of times she included the word "crawdads" in her story. Then I got to the end and I couldn't restrain my horror. Another teacher on the hall popped her head in to find out whether I was dying the death of a thousand cuts, and when I read her the offending story, she agreed that it was terrifying.



On July 6th, 2006, I was playing outside in mmy front yard when some of my friends called me over twards the creek. When I got there, they asked me if I wanted to catch some crawdads with them. I said, "Heck yea, I want to catch some crawdads!" Back then, I was such a tom-boy. I sat down to take my socks and shoes off, then I just jumped right in to catch some crawdads.

That day I caught about 20 crawdads. It was a really fun day, but when I went back the next day to see if my friends were there and they weren't, I decided to forget about them and go ahead and catch some crawdads on my own. I went home to get my "crawdad bucket" and got started.

I began by taking off my shoes and socks. Then I stepped into the creek and looked under some rocks. I saw a crawdad swimming downstream, so I followed it, and the unthinkable happened. I stepped on a 4" broken beer bottle, and it went straight through my foot.

I was in so much shock that I didn't know what to do, so I tried to climb out of creek and hop to my front door. It felt like hours trying to get to my front door, but it only took me two minutes. I lost so much blood that when I got to my front door, I collapsed. After that, I don't remember anything.