Let's Compare Feet

One of the things that I enjoy about lesson planet's weekly writing challenge is the fact that the essay can be no more than 400 words. It has been extremely hard and challenging for me. After the first week, I put a strategy in place as to how I was going to attack this challenge. Each week, I write the essay. I don't look at the word count until I am done. When I am finished, I then go back and figure out how to cut out enough words to get to the max of 400. This has helped me to be more precise with my word choice and delete words or phrases that are unimportant. This also got me thinking. How could I apply my strategy when teaching my students to write? I have thought up a few lessons that I am going to try out with them in the fall that revolve around my own strategy. I will let you know how it goes, but for now, I will continue to enjoy my summer vacation.

In week four's writing challenge, we had to write about an emotional or physical scar and tell how it came to be. Here is my story in 398 words:

                 "Let's compare feet," my grandmother has said to me every time I have seen her for the past 20 years, until recently.

                 You see, I have my grandmother's feet. I was the lucky one to inherit her not so great feet and she loved it! Not because she wanted me to feel her pain but because she had something in common with one of us that she could consistently argue wasn't as bad as hers . These feet of mine are both a blessing and a curse.

                I was 26 years old when I had an operation that fixed my left foot. My left foot had a bone that was fused together when it was supposed to be separate from the one it was fused to. Because of this, I ended up walking on that bone and the left side of my left foot came off the ground a bit. I was finally at the point where the pain was becoming unbearable.

                The operation was called Triple Arthrodesis. It was supposed to take three hours and ended up taking seven. Apparently my bones were so fused together it took a little bit longer to break them apart and refuse them correctly. The doctor ended up taking bone from my left hip to use in my foot and had to extend one of my tendons on the back of my left leg to compensate for the new arch he put in my foot.  While working on my foot, he found a lot of arthritis and ended up scraping it out. He said I had the foot of a 75 year old lady!

                I spent the next month on bed rest and three months after that in a cast. It took almost a year for me to relearn to walk without a limp. This operation left me with three scars: one on the top of my left foot, one on the back of my left calf, and one on my left hip.

                My grandmother is 93 years old today. Recently, I went to visit her in the hospital. The first thing she asked was, "How are your feet?" She is not doing so well and will probably pass away soon, but I am the lucky one blessed with her feet because every time I look at those scars I will think of her and hear her say, "Let's compare feet!"

               

My son showing my grandmother (his great-grandmother) how to play minecraft.