Before class my seventh-graders were all abuzz about their new school:
R __ P already got rejected by two girls!
P __ What?!
me __ P, just don't respond.
P __ OK.

Hours later I saw the humor in this. What tickles me is that this exchange, brief as it is, reveals two conspicuous features of the boys' personalities — R's outrageousness, P's sweet equanimity.

I asked that class to write a list of things they wanted to study. Here are the three responses I got:

Patrick
My recommendations for this semester are:
— Latin
— Old English
— word origins

Viren
1. Latin advanced from chapter 4
2. anything except this packet
3. reading — a book that is not boring
4. Latin
5. Latin
6. if nothing else — Grammar

Richard
— Latin
— Greek
— Little History of the World [Gombrich's book]
— No packet
— Grammer [sic]

(The hated packets are vocabulary exercises. It's useful for them to focus on style, usage and syntax apart from questions of logic and paragraph and essay structure, but I can see how the packets might get tedious.)

So I took those three out of the classroom and we did some Latin. As I gave them the handouts I said,

__This is from a college textbook, and the vocabulary notes are quite detailed and technical —
Viren__Oh, come on! [="Give us some credit!"]
me__ — so you're not responsible for everything in the notes.

But he's right; I shouldn't talk like that.

Note: I took a college course in Latin last year, and we used a middle school textbook. It turned out to be OK, because the teacher was good, but when I saw all those cartoons my heart sank. (And I'm glad the course was a review for me; I'd have been irritated to first encounter those things in such a book.)