If Anne Studied Electrical Engineering in Fifth Grade

My daughter Laylee – with an “e” – is mighty flowery in her language and I love to read it. She was asked to write a paragraph about her reaction to her experience studying electricity. To my pallet, it tastes a bit like Anne Shirley with just a pinch of Dickens. It goes like this:

My reactions to this electricity unit had no imperious direction. In fact, they were quite decidedly mixed. At first I was panting with eagerness to begin. That feeling continued in our hands-on activities, more excitement welling up til I nearly burst. Unfortunately, my enjoyment diminished slightly when we sat down to informational videos and reading logs, only to be replenished at the next experiment. I think the assignment with the most controversial moods was the electric house, as you might’ve suspected. Again, I started out thrilled with such a weighty project, only to feel that weight a burden instead of a boon; a huge amount of stress. As I proceeded, straining to complete my wiring in the space of a day, I alternated between surprise, triumph, and despair as my lights flickered and died, then wavered back to life. With all this, I’m not really sure of my reaction to it, but I learned a lot and either way am glad we did it.

When she says the electrical work took “the space of a day”, she is serious, like a WHOLE day and her mood ranged from excitement to boredom to full-on meltdown. I’m not sure if she stopped for lunch. She went solid from morning until night.

The house turned out cool. She wired a four room doll house with lights, but instead of using conventional lighting, she chose to light the house with paper flames to look like it had been set on fire. My little verbose pyromaniac. Like mother, like daughter.