Yesterday went really well--just the right amount of happiness and elegy. It felt good to have ended so successfully; it felt sad to know that these kids, for whom I have so much affection, are walking out of my life and into their own. They, too, felt all of this mixed happiness and sadness--sadness also for losing this peer group they'd made together, these fellow writers who'd helped them discover themselves

We spent the morning with a make-your-own-show project. I broke the group into in three sections, gave each a newspaper article containing peculiar information, and then said, "Okay, you're inventing, writing, rehearsing, and performing a new piece that arises in some way from the information in your article." I broke down their tasks into timed segments, but I in no way told them what or how to create. My only constraint was that their performance could not mirror the article: they had to begin and end their stories in different ways, and they had to imagine their characters via monologues. The whole project took two hours, and the results were spectacular. The kids were completely engaged, excited, inventive, focused: I was thrilled. It was such a good way to end the year . . . with the young people in charge of their own minds, with the young people collaborating to make wonderful new things.

Afterward several of them spoke about how much they'd enjoyed learning to collaborate. This makes me so happy. I know that schools promote group work, but often it involves predictable results, and often the groups aren't truly collaborating but are depending on one or two students to drag the rest of the group along behind. Real collaboration is a different story, and it's not easy. But after a year of incremental training (lots of generative projects involving groups, pairs, and the whole class; lots of guided conversations about work-in-progress), these kids got very comfortable about sliding into creative situations together. Yesterday's crazy, spontaneous performances were a real joy--100 percent goofy smart teenager, just as they should have been.