Sometimes on a Sunday evening I start thinking about the time when I was a young teacher determined to get my students ready for college.  On Sunday evenings coming up to Monday when I required my senior college preparatory English students to write a five-hundred-word essay from a prompt they found written on the chalk board, I would try to develop something they could actually do if they put their best thinking to it... something that could be planned and written in the fifty-minute class time... and could be ready to hand in to me at the end of class.  My goal was to have the papers read and evaluated and marked by Tuesday.  I wanted them to learn to think and plan and write under the pressure of time, and I thought they would get more out of the experience if I had the papers ready to hand back to them the day after they were written.  I didn’t tell them, but they surely figured out that I actually hated Mondays, especially Monday evenings because I sometimes wouldn’t finish evaluating the papers until one o’clock or even two o’clock in the morning.  

Tonight, just for the heck of it, I came up with a prompt I would use if I were still teaching. Here’s what my students would find tomorrow if they were filing into my classroom:

Bark is like truth... absolutely essential... rough sometimes... some would say ugly... almost always interesting.