Why You Shouldn't Allow a Student to Suggest "Cancer" For the Free-Write

Because obviously she has a story to tell. And that story will make her cry when she's reading it out loud. And it will make the other students cry.

And the teacher.

Yes, the BABYDADDY of my student has cancer. He's 27 years old and it's terminal.

Listening to her read the story out loud makes it extremely hard to move on to parts of speech or sentence fragments.

What's a community college teacher to do?

Silence bombards the room.

Finally, a student in the front raises her hand and volunteers to read her free-write. She has cancer, too. But she's a survivor. It's a happy story, and we all applaud.

Never in my life have I been so relieved to know that someone else has cancer...I mean, has survived cancer. Now I can move on to sentence fragments and forget--for the moment--that our lives, how little we know and share with one another--are fragmented.