In the first two quarters, my class and I spent the first ten minutes of every class reading a book that was not assigned for class. The goal was to encourage reading outside of class, bring down higher energy levels after gym classes and get our minds focused on the tasks at hand. For the next two quarters, this practice has been replaced by ten minutes of writing. This practice will bring down energy levels and set our minds to task, but it is also an opportunity to experiment with our creative sides. Students are free to write about anything they want or interpret the prompt in any medium they wish – the prompts are only for those who need inspiration.
I write the same prompts with my students in all three of the classes we practice this activity – teachers should always be willing to do what they ask of students. Below are the prompts from this past week and my favorite of the three responses I wrote with my classes. All prompts were written by myself.
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Monday 7 February
Describe a perfect day.
Mancora, Peru – a small beachside town on the southern Pacific Ocean right where the shore starts to fall backwards and then skywards into tall sandy cliffs, which tower in the distance from the rocky shores of the beach town. A small colonial square, with distinct coquina shell cement, is made up of cathedrals and post offices, but the real town is down closer to the nexus of that geological wishbone, and is made of wind-swept wooden shacks on stilts and sand-blasted boulevards. Palm tree frons whistle in the warm air and seagulls huddle on guano-masked rocky islands far off the shore, and the thousands of flying squatters bobbing up and down on this chalky white sheet are now blurred into silly motion by their distance from the town. The chalky islands, like the sand cliffs standing at attention past the town, like the millions of crisp white sand dollars and spindly opal starfish, were all goldenrod in the sunset.
Alberto had just driven us in his tuk-tuk around town looking for the best grilled chicken, which involved sampling a variety of grilled chicken in a town known for its grilled chicken. The three of us share hot meat and throw the bones over our shoulders into the night. Each sheet of tin unwrapped around a drumstick was coated in grease and our hands glistened in the moonlight. The waves are crashing but we can still hear humans because they all left their windows open, and all of their windows seemed to have thin flowing curtains in greens and yellows, and humans are known to appreciate a tailored scene. We drown them out with laughter.
The moonrise cast a sharp shadow in its first moments of ascent, where the cliffs caught the rays and slowly poured them over the wreck-strewn far down below. Somewhere, another window opened.
***
Tuesday 8 February
Warmth. Heat.
By nine in the morning, the sun was already killing Kalar. Pre-dawn hours were filled with the frantic movement of goods out of and in to trucks inside the bazaar, with fruit carts pushed hurriedly to make the route before daybreak, with the cries of prayer relishing the last viscosity of night time condensation. That onslaught of sun began so early, and it didn’t really begin as much as it did descend; the tops of the few trees visibly wilted and browned, their shadows becoming thinner, weaker. Air cooked above cement, melting tires in intersections or radiating off of closed aluminum side doors. Even the smells heated – the sand in the aur cauterized the insides of noses and added a universal spice to our palettes. Children did not leave home for fear of heat stroke. All of this happened, at once, with the ferocity of light breaking through after a storm.
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Wednesday 9 February
Describe an object in great detail. Try not to describe what it does or where it is from. Focus on an “objective” description of how the object moves and feels and looks.
Most pens leave no impression on the user, nothing more than a faint muscle spasm after usage or the ghost of friction between fingertip and paper. This pen is different. It’s fatter, so my hand can more comfortably grasp the thing, cramping later than usual. It is charcoal black, matted, and feels substantial in weight. FENGTAIYUAN is written on the side in even, uniform letters. Chinese characters in an almost-complete circle are starting to fade, the strokes of the characters after years of use. The cap does click in the closed position, but has such a perfect circumference that it stays in place once open. Cheap-looking gold accents on the cap and butt are at once browning and yellowing with age. The tip – like a surgical knife, the ultra-fine tip of this tool cuts with enough friction to feel contact and send nerve responses like purrs up my arm but not enough friction to require excessive pressure from my hand. It is my favorite pen.
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Thursday 10 February
Yesterday you learned that all of your dreams have been recorded and uploaded to an obscure thread on Reddit. You or someone you know has the technical skills to track down the user, but the videos are very popular and are now across the internet. What do you do? Why?
After meeting this mysterious user, I want to start a business deal. Their people and my people would meet up and develop a virtual reality simulation based on some of the weirder dreams I’ve had. Each time a user puts on the headset, the dream is randomly selected. With enough support, we could turn it in a full-on videogame, where players could go through these different dreams as non-repeatable levels. If the recorder captured all of my dreams, there’s enough content there for at least hundreds of thousands of different experiences.
***
Friday 11 February
Youth Day – No School
I’m spending the long weekend in Dschang, a stunningly gorgeous region in the Western province of Cameroon. Along with some friends, we visited a local tea plantation, a bat-filled cave, several waterfalls, and the top of a mountain. Here are some pictures.
certification 
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