Final Duty

As my last official act of the school year, this morning I ordered the t-shirt prizes for the 13 students who successfully completed the 100-Day Writing Challenge. 

I'd been putting the chore off a bit because it's a nuisance to add all the addresses and verify the purchase on my Amazon account in order to have the shirts sent to the kids at home, but on this rainy Wednesday, when our pickleball and lunch plans were upset by the weather, I finally sat down with the bright orange order forms I had the Centurions fill out last week. 

Any irritation I may have felt at the extra clicking and tedious typing was erased by the opportunity to consider each young writer one more time and to see which of the thousands of shirts on the Woot site they opted for. Their choices are always a bit surprising: whimsical and often revealing of a side of them that, even after an entire school year and a hundred days of writing, I didn't know. So it was with a little bit of sadness that I clicked submit on the last order and bid farewell to a really great group of kids.