As I was organizing things for the first class of the year yesterday, I found a gem from the archives. We had been learning about the past perfect tense and how weird it is to try to write in it in any extended way. Instead of just blabbing at the kids about this, I had them write a group poem. The rule: everything had to be in past perfect. It gets weird, as group poems do, but the first line and ending are priceless. I love that the class not only answered to the prompt but found the potential humor in the stiffness of the tense. Please read in a serious, Bondish voice.