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It has been seven days now where my back has not been a major concern. It gives me hope. Now if I can just avoid doing stupid stuff like weed eat the yard, which I did four weeks ago, which caused this last spate of pain. Work is going well; I only have a couple of butt-headed children this year. Friday I had two, count them two, “sometimes a shining moment” moments. A girl whose first book was a box car children book, (keeping in mind these are seniors in high school) after reading her second book ( a book about abuse where she identified with the girl because she had been abused before she was put in a foster home), decided to try a book she thought would be too hard, but she was interested in it, and since she didn’t have to have another book read for five weeks, she thought she would give it a try. Letting the students pick the books they are reading does so much more than forcing them to read books they are not ready for. That girl, who wants to go to college, has done more for herself as far as college prep is concerned, by deciding on her own to read a harder book, than I could have done all year forcing them to read the usual Brit lit books seniors normally read. The second “moment” was another girl who made the deeper symbolic connections in Alice Hoffman’s “Green Angel” as she was talking to me about the book. The stereotype of a light going off in her head as she talked stunned me: her eyes became bigger and brighter she smiled, and said,”Oh, man, I get it. That’s wild.” All unprompted by me, except for a single question about the character’s tattoos. Sometimes my job is great.