Gentle reader, I need to thank you for your patience. Being a full-time middle school teacher and full-time doctoral student does not afford me lots of free time. While I fully intended to post a new blog discussing my students’ nominations for their book awards, the end of April was wrought with deadlines. And now I find myself in mid-May, wondering where does the time go?

As you know, my seventh-grade students have nominated books for their book awards. I have two groups of seventh-graders, so I have two different awards: The Spectacular Sevie Award and the The Ms. Schmidt’s B3 Class Award for Outstanding Achievements in the Field of Excellent Writing (MSB3CAOAIFEW). The next step was nominating books. Each student nominated one book. I was a bit concerned. Would every student nominate a title? After all, no matter how much I rave, I do have some students who don’t read a lot outside of class. As one of my boys mentioned to me the other day, “The Hunger Games was the first book I read outside of DEAR, Ms. Schmidt.” (He’s now reading Catching Fire and not happy with it because, “They’re just on the train.”) The nominations came flooding in. My fears were unfounded. All the students nominated a book, and some wanted to nominate multiple books. Then I had to figure out how to group books and form “committees.” I didn’t have to figure this out; I just asked the kids how they wanted to handle it.