Adina’s Cute & Perky Blog!

Thursday was Spelling test day.

I had one glass labeled as “gifted.”

They used to make sport of pulling the dictionary out and trying to find words that I did not know.

You see, words are my thing. I always have a dictionary at the ready. I have Word of the Day calendars at home and at work. My favorite books are books on words, and dictionary.com is my home page.

Truly, I have a love for words.

I quite often made my students learn new words from my calendar with me. They found it both irritating and funny that I made it a habit to learn one new word a day.

Armed with their arsenal of new words, they thought that I could not stump them.

So, they asked me for some bonus points on the next spelling test.

So I said, “OK. Dictation.”

And remember, they were the gifted class…

We made rules and agreed on them. No weird words from my calendar.

The day of the test came, and they were ready…or so they thought.

The test concluded and twenty-five papers flipped to the back without my ever asking them to.

“OK class. One sentence. All or nothing. Ten bonus points at stake.”

Papers shuffled. Butts wiggled. Nerds high-fived.

Until the sentence fell from my mouth…

“Arnold Schwarzenegger stared in Kindergarten Cop.”

Even the nerds were not happy.

So many things I could zap then with here . The sentence was rife with chances for 8th grade errors!

And the whining continued.

OK… I’ve got a plan . You can choose between the sentence I just read or a second one. But… should you choose the second one, five bonus points, max.

They agreed, as I read the sentence, “Nadia Comaneci was a famous Romanian gymnast.”

MS. STEWART!!!

Even the best of the best had THE LOOK.

But of course, I had been prepared for this.

I walked quietly to my desk and grabbed three photos.

The first picture showed a woman who had been burned over 95% of her body. The second showed a boy with three prosthetic limbs where two legs and one arm used to be. The third showed a picture of someone sitting in an AA Meeting.

“All three lives touched by the same addiction. Three very different outcomes. The woman was hit by someone who didn’t make it to one of those meetings.”

You could have heard a pin drop.

“Sometimes, life is just not fair. But you still need to pick one of those sentences and give it your best effort.”

No words were spoken as the tests were turned in. None at all.

Nor were there any spoken when I handed the graded papers back out the next day, and each child had received ten bonus points.

But the lesson was the same. It was the same one from the day before.

“Sometimes, life is not fair.

It’s not fair to the students across the hall that you got bonus points for nothing.

It’s just that sometimes you’re on the good end of the not fair stick, and sometimes you’re on the bad.

Either way, life isn’t fair.”

And yeah, they groaned when the assignment directly after that was to write a paragraph about life not being fair.

But that’s what they get for not knowing how to spell Arnold’s last name, y’all! That’s just what they get!!!