I spent the day, yesterday, at with a bunch of current and former students at the Odyssey of the Mind regional tournament.  Both of our schools two teams took home third place medals, which is very good, but neither team will advance to the state tournament this year.

While hanging around between events, one of my former students asked if this year’s class had done Midsummer Night’s Dream yet.   I answered that I wasn’t sure if we were going to get to it because we don’t have enough time left for both Midsummer Night’s Dream and Old Man and the Sea, so which one did he think we should do.

“Well,” he thought out loud, “Old Man and the Sea is a really good book.”

Frankly, this comment is what made my day yesterday.

The rest of the eighth graders said  that we should do Midsummer Night’s Dream, but it’s too bad we won’t also be able to do Old Man and the Sea because it is a really good book.

The truth is that since my district eliminated the GATE class in favor of what’s called a GATE cluster, a small group of six or so GATE students included in a regular English/history class,  neither book may be suitable for my current set of students, but I’m determined to give at least one of them a go.  I’m leaning towards Midsummer Night’s Dream at this point.

We’ll have to see how things turn out with our current book The Call of the Wild first.