This year I’m trying a new starter: Write Into the Day. Basically, it’s a short writing exercise that is intended to get their minds in a literary space. I’ve tinkered with it, changed a few things, altered how we share, but so far, I’ve left the core idea alone: write a few sentences about a given prompt.

Last week, one of the prompts was this: “What lights that fire in you to give it your all?” When I was reading the responses this weekend, I found this one:

Mr Scott because he wants me to be my best in school so everytime he talks to me in the hallway about how much brain cells I have. After we finish talking in the hallway and when I go to my class I’m ready to learn so He always fires me up every time in class so Mr scott fires me and I give it all I have.

These kids kill me: it takes the smallest thing sometimes. This boy was telling me early in the year that he couldn’t do any better because he “only has two brain cells.”

“What are you talking about? You’ve got something like 120 billion brain cells, and they all work just fine as far as I can tell.”

The next day I saw him, I’d done some calculations, and I told him, “You know if all your brain cells were one second each, you’d have 3,800 years worth of seconds!”

“Really?!” He couldn’t believe it.

The smallest things…