Connor's First Open Mic

Connor participated in his elementary's school's first ever open mic night. Modeled after the Busboys and Poets Poetry Slam, children were asked to submit a piece of writing they had completed. The PTA would choose works across grades in a random selection, and would supplement the line-up by asking teachers to nominate students as well.

I never turned in the submission form, because Connor's writing lacks depth, shall we say? For him to string two sentences together is a near miracle, but for whatever reason, participating in this event stuck in his craw. I figured he'd forget about it but the day after entries were due, he came to me waving the reminder flier (how he found it amongst the approximately one bajillion items sent home every Friday I will never know) and begged me not to forget to submit something for him.

Craptastic.

So I figured I would submit something late, and hope the committee would have mercy on me. You see, every other time this year there has been a deadline, I have met it. Only to get an email the day after the due date saying "if you didn't meet the deadline, don't worry. Submit whatever random thing you were supposed to submit by the end of the week".

But for that event? The day after entries were recieved - just minutes after Connor had reminded me not to forget, I received an email in my inbox proclaiming "everyone who signed up gets to participate!". So I emailed the PTA president immediately, begged forgiveness, explained that Connor wanted to do this the entire time but I was too lazy to work with him and submit something, and if they could not accept something from him I totally understood because they'd sent home many reminders and this was ALL MY FAULT. And really, I'm a bad mom sometimes, but that's my problem, not theirs. The PTA president forwarded my pathetic email to the committee chair and she took pity on me and said she'd be happy to include Connor.

So then we spent Christmas break writing a story. I have to hand it to Connor. The story started out with his typical two sentences (something along the lines of: She dropped her fishing pole in the water. We couldn't find it.") but he was thrilled to keep writing as I asked him questions about the story, asked if there was anything else an audience who wasn't actually at the event being described would want to know, who is "she", etc. It was hard work, and he rocked it. We even went so far as to cut up his written work into sentences that he could easily re-arrange and write another sentence to insert in between.

Prior to leaving for the evening, I told Connor he needed to wear "fancy clothes" which means, no sweat pants. He took it up a notch and hung one of Ed's ties around his neck as well. We are nothing, if not an awesome dressing family.

Connor is so thrilled with this piece, I cannot possibly capture it in words. However, I can present to you his performance (yay video camera!) and let you know that in Ed's completely biased opinion, Connor's was the best first grade piece.

I thought the collection of storytellers was a complete hoot. Helen seemed to enjoy several pieces and only criticized one as being "really long".

I hope they have the event again. The only thing that really annoyed me is that Connor was so proud of himself - just beaming, and then at the end they announced, in typical public school fashion "and all our writers get a prize". I know Connor loves these prizes, but I really feel as if the school is doing everything it can to eliminate all internal motivation. I hope they don't succeed.

Elaine