IRA14 All In! Presentation

For those of you who attended our session at IRA 2014, THANK YOU.  You were kind, supportive, and understanding.  You all gave us just the positive energy we needed to overcome our technical woes.  Below you will find the content from the slide show we'd planned.  Please enjoy, pass it along to your friends, and let us know how we can help you lead your school on your very own literary adventure.  Go All In!

 

All In!™

Uniting One School with One Book

 Mary Cotillo and Erin O'Leary

Horace Mann Middle School, Franklin MA

Abnegation Erin and Amity Mary

 Meet The Crazy Reading Ladies

Mary Cotillo is an 8th grade ELA teacher at HMMS.  She's been teaching middle school for 12 years. 

Erin O'Leary is the Reading Specialist at HMMS.  She has been teaching for 9 years. 

Wait...what do y'all do again?

The Crazy Reading Ladies:

• help adolescents become book lovers
• empower teachers to be leaders in their school
• break social barriers
• promote community engagement

We have the kids follow a simple formula:

1. Read the Book
2. Show What You Know
3. See the Movie 
4. Join the Adventure

 Why We Rock (no really...we do)

2012 - The Hunger Games
221 kids, 42% of the school
(We were expecting 30 kids...we didn't think to keep data on subgroups!)

2013 - The Hobbit
188 kids, 38% of the school
41% of students with IEPs and 100% of ReAch* 

2014 - Divergent
280 kids, 59% of the school
31% of students with IEPs and 75% of ReAch

*ReAch is our emotional and behavioral sub-separate program

Choose Wisely 
 
No pressure, but don't blow it.

• Likeability
• If the kids don't like it, they won't read it

• Visibility
• Don't underestimate the value of Hollywood merchandising

•  Potential
• Field Trip!
• Teachability (yeah, totally not a real word)
• Appropriateness for your demographic

 When in doubt...

Text complexity and daunting page counts are not roadblocks; they are accomplishments waiting to be celebrated. 





Build Excitement
Just Say No

How do you get kids to care about a book?

It's about drama, pure and simple; create a buzz among the students and a frenetic desire to know the title.

If you do it right...
(No, you can't have him.)

• Videos
• Teachers
• Contests
• Costumes
• Propoganda
• Mystery

Incentivize
"But...reading is its own reward!"

Let the kids lead.

Good thing we didn't read any research first!

Anecdotal (and Adorable Evidence)
Florida goes All In!




How Stinkin' Cute Is He?

The CRL Effect: 
Extrinsic begets Intrinsic

Although the movie gets them to pick up the book, it's the story that keeps them reading and the sense of accomplishment that gets them to read the sequel.  




Support and Encourage
"But extra time is on my IEP!"

• Structure - calendars, deadlines
• Audio books
• Physical books
• Discussion groups
• Reading groups
• Public Library
• Encourage parent read-alouds

Hey, look!
Portfolio evidence for parent engagement!

Public library events promote community and belonging.
"When she reads, it works its way through the family."




Celebrate!
I always thought the lyrics were "Celebrate good times! Go Home!"

Assessments as celebrations? You must be crazy!
Um...yeah. 

Give then an opportunity to show what they know and celebrate their accomplishment. 

Right Where We Belong

• Literary Soul Mates
• Seredipity
  
• Just do it!

@allinreading
@allincotillo
@allinoleary

Visit our Official Website: allinreading.org






 

All In! is a product of Overwhelming Success, Inc., an Educational Non-Profit

 

              

 

The Agony (and Ecstasy) of Defeat

Get ready NOLA, here we come!

Are you going to #IRA14 this year?  

Please come see us at session 1923 on Sunday.  

We'd love to meet you!

If you have a kid enrolled in an extracurricular activity, have attended an awards ceremony for anyone under the age of 16, or have simply driven by a soccer field, you are probably familiar with the EGAT philosophy: Everybody Gets a Trophy.

Somewhere along the way, building a child's self esteem became more important than building resilience.  We learned that kids feel better about themselves when they are successful, and that somehow turned into "We must create successes for our students."

Although research has clarified the difference between the sense of satisfaction created for being awarded a trophy for showing up and one earned via true effort, that distinction hasn't really permeated the world of education.  Not yet.  Teachers still scramble to make sure kids feel success.  

Please don't think we're judging.  We do it in our classrooms, too.  It's hard to implement strategies that reflect a philosophy that kids learn more from failure than they do from success.  Maybe it's because failure has to be done in the "right" way - in a safe environment where students have multiple opportunities to show what they know and there isn't the pressure of a low grade ending up on a report card - something difficult to do in this world of high-stakes testing and an ever-increasing list of curricular demands.  But we digress.  



"I hope I win!"

This post is all about failure.  At a recent after school DIVERGENT activity, students were allowed to spend an hour playing whatever carnival game their heart desired (and an express order from Oriental Trader could provide).   Kids played for tickets to earn points for their faction.  You'd think they'll all go for the easy games, right?  Or gravitate toward the games they were good at.  Well, you'll likely be as surprised as we were.

Maybe WE are getting comfy in our blingy CRL shirts, seeing the light at the end of our Third Year tunnel (we may be tossing around book titles...) but thankfully, our students still have surprises left to reveal.

And we have a lot to learn from them.

Since Mary has the honor of having an All In! initiate under her roof, she had the inside scoop on how the kids enjoyed themselves at the carnival.

"Omigosh mom, that food can thing? That was my favorite. My friend and I were so horrible. We had to keep going until we knocked at least one down!"

Waiting in line to lose

At first, it was nothing more than a cute conversation the CRL shared the next morning. "What a cool kid - she liked the challenge!"

We thought that was it; thankfully, there's always more to the story.

After our Faction Initiation carnival, a student stopped Mary in the hall, telling us how much fun he had. Out of curiosity Mary asked, "What was your favorite part?" to which the Candor 6th grader replied, "Oh, the egg balancing thing! That was awesome!"

After this encounter, a puzzled Mary approached Erin's classroom and said, "You know the Candor boy you were with on Friday? The one you said couldn't balance an egg on his head to save his life? Apparently, that was his favorite activity."

Really? How could that be?  He was horrible at balancing that darn thing on his head.  He lost. A lot.

Lessons learned from our initiates

Sure enough, when we talked to Katie (who had manned Dauntless' Exploding Muffins) she told us about one Dauntless girl who never left the line. "She kept waiting her turn to go again. She really wanted to explode all three muffins.  She was awful; but man she was determined."

Now, we know 3 kids out of 100+ isn't much of a sample size, but still.  If three kids spent their time trying to master something they found challenging, we're willing to bet that others did, too.  It intrigued us so much that Mary posed a few questions to her 8th grade ELA classes the next day.  

Why are kids willing to battle frustration for an hour while trying to balance something on their head but they give up a the first sign of confusion with a homework assignment?  Why are kids willing to take risks on the sports fields but choose the easiest option when presented with school projects?  

The overwhelming response: fear.  

They fear failure.  They fear disappointing their teachers and parents.  They fear the low grade they could receive if they choose the harder option.  They fear the feeling in their stomach when they see the F on the paper.  They fear messing up when it counts.


All lined up and ready to fail
 for the fun of it!

Mary's brain was swimming with trying to figure out the implications of all that her students were saying, so she didn't press for more detail.  Instead, her addled brain managed to find one more question. 

What makes a challenge fun?  

Again, the response was clear.  Challenges are fun when they don't count.  Students will try anything as long as they know they won't lose credit or points or face.  If they aren't worried about being made fun of or criticized or getting an "F," they're willing and able to give it a shot.  

We're sure this isn't a groundbreaking observation; there are likely fifteen books written on the subject.  But somehow, when the issue comes off the page and becomes the flesh and blood kid standing in front of you with a grin on his bespectacled face, laughing at how he couldn't keep a wooden egg on his curly head, it becomes a whole lot more real.  

Here's our take.  When presented with a challenge, kids ask themselves "What if...?"  This is good.  We want them to consider potential outcomes for their actions!  The problem is their brains have negative answers at the ready, and what positive answers they can generate they do not trust.   So when they ask, "What if I get something wrong?", their brain replies with "Then you lose points" rather than "Then you'll get a chance to figure out what went wrong and try again."  When they ask, "What if I don't do well?"  They answer themselves with "Then you fail" instead of trusting that they'll have a chance to try again.  


Vinko Bogataj, aka: The Agony of Defeat Guy

Why did our DIVERGENT initiates spend all their time at one station, trying again and again and again?  There are a multitude of factors at work.  One reason would be because of the teachers at each station saying, "That's okay!  You're getting better!  Try again!"  No one said they'd used up all their tries.  No one told them they had to move on to another unit.  Another reason would be because it didn't count.  Sure they were playing for tickets, but there was no report card grade attached to their success or failure at using a beanbag to knock over a pile of cans.  They were playing for something greater than tickets; they were playing for pride and the sense of accomplishment that comes with improvement.  

We share this story more to share inspiration than anything else.  Our takeaway:  under the right circumstances, students don't mind struggle.  In fact, they enjoy it. Your classroom can be fun *and* challenging, the two are not mutually exclusive.  What are those perfect circumstances? Well, we wish we could wrap up this post with a cure-all suggestion for making your classroom a place where students try, try, try until they can pump their fist and say, "Yes!" when they experience success.  The truth is, though, that while we have more insight than we once did, we're still lacking in the strategies department. 

This is where you come in.  If you have strategies for creating an environment where students embrace challenge rather than avoid it, please share them in the comments section.  Thanks! 

Six Buses

"Be sure you get all six in the picture!"

In the Fall of 2012, after THE HUNGER GAMES and before THE HOBBIT, our Principal (sarcastically? seriously? we'll never know) mentioned that our goal was to load six buses full of readers.  The gauntlet had been thrown and, over the last year-and-a-half, the battle cry of "six buses" echoed through the hallway and peppered our casual conversations.  We knew it was sort of a joke, but we'd be kidding you if we didn't have that set as a dream in the back of our collective CRL brain. 



Little Miss CRL was All In! this year;
she turned in her slip the very next day.

On March 21, 2014 it happened. We got our six buses.

By field trip standards, this was remarkably easy.  At one point we looked at each other and said, "Are you kidding me?  Was it just that easy?" With two hundred forty-five students, twenty faculty members, and four parents, the odds were certainly stacked for something to go awry...but nothing ever did.  Our abundance of literate colleagues and parents ensured that the CRL and Principal were not even assigned a group.  We got to bounce around, take pictures, and take notes. Yes, the brilliant one began this blog post in the theater.

Allow Mary and Erin to relive their favorite moments from the movie:

• We fully expected the Tris/Four kiss to be the squee-fest that it was. Our kids ate it up! Their reaction was adolescent-adorable. It was such fun to watch them see it on the big screen.

• When Theo James asked a theater full of middle schoolers (and their teachers) if we "Want to see" his tattoos, the answer came in screaming and cat-calling unison: "YES!!!" One precocious 6th grader bemoaned that he spent most of the movie with his upper half clothed. 
• The knife that sliced through Jeanine's hand was a Hollywood add-on - one our kids didn't see coming - and they loved it.  That was cause for more cheers and spontaneous applause.  And actually, a lot of boys cited that as their favorite moment in the whole film.  (Aside: When I taught 2nd-Grade boys, I remember one year we were working on a mural and there was one teensy spot of blood that needed to be painted on the character's hand.  There was such tear-filled debate over who was going to paint the red spot - on an 8-foot mural - that I told the art teacher to paint it himself.)
• Christina's test of courage was remarkably underwhelming.  We heard someone ask: "Where are the rapids?"  "Yea. She was just hanging above a cliff. No crashing waves, no splashing water". For the record, Lionsgate, HMMS was not impressed.  Didn't you people read the book?
• Our sweetheart Lucy. She's had a rough year, and reading DIVERGENT was a huge accomplishment - one that allowed her to experience school in a positive light.  She was on the edge of her seat the entire movie and said this was one of the best days of her life.  She was so proud...it was her first year going All In! and she wore her shirt every day that week.
• When the Dauntless manifesto was read, our kids proclaimed it right along with...what was his name? Was that guy even a character in the book?  I don't know, but he used to be on ER. 
• At the start of Phase 2: Dauntless initiation, we heard a psyched someone shout "Yes! Fear landscape!"
• We heard them shout "Yes!" again when it was time for Capture the Flag; but again, our critics were not very impressed, "Where are the paintballs?" And the major change to Tris single-handedly retrieving the flag and claiming victory?  We just shook our heads.  It'll sure be nice when Hollywood comes to us before turning books into movies.
• Mary brought Erin's attention to a the name "Erin" sitting at the very bottom of the scoreboard after Phase 1 of Dauntless Initiation.  She nudged her, "You're in last place." To which Erin responded, "I'd still be riding the **** train." No worries...Mary will take care of Erin at the Amity compound!
  
• We tried to get a student-filled-cinema picture for our collection - we have a theater picture from each year - but they never turned our lights back on.  We did get some cute video, though.  The movie ended, "Find You" played, and Mary said, "Wait for it, they're gonna sing!" and sure enough, they sang right along as the credits rolled.  A-DOR-A-BLE! 

It was such a joy to share this day with our kiddos and each other.  Since we had seen the movie with our Three-Peats several days prior, we could enjoy watching our cherubs. Yep, we spent over two hours watching them watch the movie. 

 Believe us when we tell you that there's nothing like watching a movie with a few hundred adolescent readers.  Their audible reactions - moments of shrieks and sheer silence - postures, gasps, and giggles are worth every second of planning, strife, and stress.  

When you go All In, the good always outweighs the bad. 

Here's our 2014 Commemorative Field Trip video.

This year, we created an online DIVERGENT course using our school's ItsLearning portal. We've posted polls, videos, and discussion board questions for our kiddos (it saw a lot of action over February break...it was super cool to keep the conversation going.)  So this year, thanks to the poll feature, we actually have a pretty graph to show how our kids voted in response to the question Book or Movie? 

In case you were wondering...

With numbers like that,
I think our job is done.

                                                

Mary @allincotillo
Erin @allinoleary
CRL @allinreading 

Initiation

Black and white, baby!

If you've read DIVERGENT, you wouldn't be surprised that our kids expected an initiation.  We expected to host one, too.  It also won't surprise you that we put a CRL spin on things. After our Principal cancelled the order of serum injections, we were left with very few options.



Exploding muffins

We started with the idea of running five separate initiations.  We brainstormed a different activity for each faction, playing to their strengths: logic puzzles for Erudite, target practice for Dauntless, that sort of thing. But after days of planning (and several orders of takeout) we couldn't think of much for our humble Abnegation kiddos except community service.  Sure, we could have them help teachers after school, clean out lockers, and wash desks for points.  They'd do it...we knew they would...but it seemed heartless to have them traipse around the school with a trashcan and Clorox wipes while they heard Dauntless shouts coming from the gymnasium. 

Somewhere along the way, perhaps whilst perusing an Oriental Trading catalog, we stumbled upon the idea of a carnival.  You know when something just *feels* right?  Well, this was one of those moments.  We started out calling paintball venues and ended up with a carnival. Whoda guessed?!



Oh yes: PLINKO! We bought two.

With our minds (and budget) set on a carnival,
we quickly switched gears from meaningful-literary-connections to good old fashioned fun.  Instead of selecting stations for each faction ahead of time, we decided on a Free-For-All.  All stations would be open to all factions; let 'em run around for an hour with their friends and collect tickets and just be kids.  What a liberating concept!


Our darling Amity kiddos, seated in a circle.

Of course, we couldn't completely turn our back on the idea of connecting to the book.  Instead of pretending to have uncovered deeper symbolic meaning in the throwing of a beanbag at a clown, we openly acknowledged our silliness.  In explaining the event to the kids just before opening the games, Mary said, "We made a few connections, a few very LOOSE connections to the factions, but really the point of today is just for you to have fun."  Then the students were free to explore:

Dauntless Target Practice - throwing a beanbag at a clown/net/thing.
Candor's Balancing Act - walk a circuit with a wooden egg balanced on your head
Amity's Duck Pond - play Duck Duck Goose.  Winners get to pick a duck from the pond.  
Abnegation's Break Time at the Food Pantry - throw a ball to knock down cans
Candor Lets the Chips Fall Where They May - Plinko!
Erudite's Potential to Kinetic Energy Transfer - ring toss
Abnegation Tunic Trot - sack race
Erudite's Food Chain Fling - use a rubber frog to shoot down foam apples
Dauntless Exploding Muffin - balloon darts
Around the Amity Campfire - sing songs with your friends!

Pick a winner at the Amity duck pond.

Looking back, we made a lot of decisions based on what was easier for us. Stations were set up, scripts were given to Faction Leaders (aka our fabulous colleagues who gave up yet another Friday afternoon to come play), and tickets were allotted.  Taking into account the varying populations of our factions, the CRL decided to work in some math and award points based on tickets per capita. Be impressed. Be very impressed.



"Every year, we're doing a sack race."

The kids took the attendance. (Dauntless wouldn't sit still long enough to allow their 8th grade representative to get an accurate headcount.  Amity seated themselves in a circle while a sweet little 6th grade girl calmly led the roll call.) The kids tallied their tickets. (Dauntless asked for a calculator while struggling to add their points together.  Erudite presented Erin with their total and had already factored their percentage, down to two decimal points.  We kid you not.)



We were absolutely overwhelmed by the teachers who came to help. A few teachers made it a family event by bringing their elementary aged children in to play.  Our collective CRL heart melted when again we had a dozen high schoolers return to HMMS - this time surprising their teachers with costume changes! - eager to take over Initiation games.  Every single station was manned by a staff volunteer so we were free to just take it all in...laugh out loud at the sheer joy of kids jumping in sacks (on Friday we decided no matter what book we do, we will always have a sack race), offering suggestions for egg balancing to those with slippery hair, cheering on the girls who just would not give up until they'd popped that darn balloon!  

We did get just a little punchy when deciding point values for the activities.  Mary is still laughing about putting a 2 on the bottom of each and every duck in the pond.  

Everyone is a winner, get it? Amity doesn't have competition!



Loving the chaos on Initiation Afternoon

The exceedingly patient colleague who worked the duck pond on Friday reports there was only one riot when the kids figured out the schtick.  Most, though, were happy to just go along for the ride.  In one of the afternoon's more memorable moments, an eighth-grade boy - who had his eye on the kids seated in a circle around a dozen plastic floating ducks - asked, "Is this Duck Duck Goose?" When he received an affirmative, he nodded sagely and sat down, declaring, "I like it!"

Faculty throwdown

Now, if you know anything about the CRL, you know we love spectacle.  It just so happens that Oriental Trading sells carnival supplies *and* sumo wrestling inflatables.  What does one have to do with the other?  We have no idea, but could you say no to giant sumo inflatables?  Yeah, we couldn't either.  Initially, we thought the sumo wrestling could be the Dauntless initiation.  But we didn't want the kids to fall and break themselves, so we saved the wrestling for the finale and allowed teachers to suit up for bonus points for the faction of their choice.  Besides saying we work with the absolute best colleagues in the world, we'll let the photo speak for itself.  


Shameless Plug: We'd love for you to join us this Thursday night, 3/13/14, at 8:00pm for a Twitter discussion about student engagement and motivation with book clubs #IRAchat

-Mary and Erin
@allincotillo @allinoleary

Where We Belong

It was 7:25 on Friday morning; a sixth grader bounced into the front office and circled around the secretary. "Do you know what today is? It's All In!  All In is todaaayyyy!"  That was just the beginning.

It's no secret - the Crazy Reading Ladies did their fair share of bouncing around on Friday, too. 

The theme of our first activity was "Where You Belong."  The five factions are central to the plot of DIVERGENT, so our first mission was to sort our cherubs based on what they value.  Kids rotated among seven faculty-led stations to confront various moral dilemmas.  Their answers determined their faction, and the results were entertainingly accurate. 

That's…a lot of initiates!

DIVERGENT has brought us our biggest numbers yet - 281 students - and we planned our first event in a way that would (hopefully) accommodate our voracious readers. We weren't sure how many would decide to stay after school the Friday before a long weekend; but, as the day wore on and we encountered one bouncing child after another, we laughed and said, "I think we're going to get slammed."

Slammed we were.  

When the doors opened, over one hundred-sixty middle schoolers poured into the gymnasium.

One happy seventh grader.

The view from Year Three is pretty fabulous.  We are thrilled beyond belief to have more participants than ever, and yet somehow, the planning has gotten infinitely easier.  We weren't nervous anticipating what was to come; we were excited.  We've already confessed that this event was planned mere days beforehand.  Well, we also made changes with one hour to go.  "Let's change how we reveal the factions." YEA! "Let's add a costume event to the relay!" COOL! We rolled with it, it worked…and it was good.  

Besides, it's kind of awesome that we've amassed such a costume cache over the last three years, we didn't even need to shop!  

Fabulous faculty faction fashionistas.

Our attendance list was impeccable, and our teachers were superlative.  Oh, while we're mentioning how organized we are, we should probably tell you that teachers came to help with zero knowledge or preparation. See, the CRL had written a two-page missive with specific instructions the day before. We emailed it between the two of us, added details, and even edited it. It was pretty wonderful, and it would have been incredibly helpful. And we completely forgot to email it to our colleagues. 

We work with the most supportive faculty on the planet; over a dozen teachers, both of our administrators, and the school secretary braved the chaos and came to play. This left the CRL free to roam, extinguish small fires, snap pictures, and enjoy.  For that, we can't thank them enough.  

Some of our wonderful cherubs.

To be perfectly honest, this labor of love is highly emotional for the CRL. It's hard not to get choked up when you see teachers dressed in faction colors, sprawled on the floor with kids after school.  We've had teachers that have been with us since the beginning, and those who experienced their first All In! event this past Friday.  

The euphoric finish to the faction relay.

We see struggling readers march in to the gymnasium with pride, unable to wipe the smile off their faces. We see regular ed and special ed kids working and laughing and posing together. We look around and see three-peats and newbies. After three years of putting up with her mom's endless meetings with the other Crazy Reading Lady, we have our own little CRL in attendance now. (She's in Candor and unsurprisingly volunteered...demanded?... to run the first leg of the relay race.) And we lost our breath when we saw a child who is a frequent truancy concern make his way to the gym. After school, on a Friday, because he read a book…for fun.

All In! alumni

As if we needed any other reason to be emotional, we can't help but reflect on our own middle school experiences. We'll be straight with you: we were NOT cool.  Just the fact that we're able to write "our own middle school experiences" without breaking into hives is impressive.  We were not popular, or poised, or pretty.  Yet somehow, we've managed to create a middle school experience to which our kids want to return.  Friday afternoon, eight alumni showed up from the high school to lend a hand, cheer initiates, hug their teachers, and have fun.  Kids wanting to come back to middle school?  That just might be our biggest achievement yet.  And it solidifies the gut feeling we've had since the beginning of this crazy reading adventure: that working together, in this school, with these kids…this is where we belong.

-Mary @allincotillo and Erin @allinoleary

Factions

Mary:
When Katie, Erin and I met around my kitchen table to plan the book reveal, we took faction quizzes.  Predictably, Erin identified with Abnegation and Katie with Dauntless.  I really wanted to be Erudite.  Not only do I value learning, but blue is a really great color for me.  I was somewhat disappointed to be grouped with Amity.  I took another quiz, this time choosing answers I thought had a slightly more intellectual flavor.  Nope.  Still Amity.  I took quiz after quiz after quiz.  Amity, Amity, Amity.  Phbt.  I don't look good in yellow. 

Owning our faction fashions.

The night before the big reveal, I didn't sleep well.  I tossed and turned a lot.  I didn't attribute my restlessness to anything in particular.  I had a big day ahead of me.  There was the reveal, a new lesson to teach to my classes, and my parents were in town for a rare dinner opportunity.  It wasn't until I was walking in to school, fighting the growing nausea, that I realized I was nervous.

After our on-air, highly scripted, excessively-rehearsed argument, we each snatched up our book and left the news room in a bit of a huff.  News crew kids tailed Miss O'Leary and grilled her; I eavesdropped from the guidance office, grinning like an idiot.  As I hid like the Amity coward I am, I realized something.  I didn't lose sleep because I had to speak on the news.  I wasn't nervous because I knew I'd be addressing a room of 500+.  Nope.  My stomach was now completely calm.  I felt sick because I didn't want to fight with Erin.  Huh.  I guess I'm Amity after all. 

CRL update twelve weeks later…

We were planning our first event, inspired by a colleague's Scruples-like faction activity.  We took seven moral dilemma-type queries and generated five responses to each one, hopefully capturing the values held by the factions.  

The humble, innocuous Abnegation
slipped right under the radar.

We also had a strong desire to out-think our kidlets.  See, every sixth-grade girl wants to be Dauntless.  Every eighth-grade boy wants to be Dauntless too, and will go so far as to answer the questions in the back of Veronica Roth's bestseller reflecting whom they hope to be, not as the student who cried in Miss O'Leary's class when she corrected his capitalization error.

See what we mean?

We had a lot of fun with it - what U.S city would  Candor visit? What would Dauntless eat for dinner?

Candor is ready to relay…
and tell the world.

So we made up the responses.  All thirty-five of them.  Sure we had justifications - and we totally thought they were clever - but we had a decent dose of mind-messing thrown in, "No one is going to order sushi, they'll all choose chicken fingers and fries - we'll totally get some Abnegation!"  FYI - turns out, a considerable number of middle schoolers order sushi.  Who knew?

The Erudite included every member
of our school's math team. No joke.

When all was said and done, and all one hundred sixty-something initiates rotated through the stations, we stood in awe.  Not only did our test result in a fairly even distribution of initiates, it was incredibly, impeccably, hysterically accurate.  


When it came time for the faction relay race, this is what went down. 

"Go ahead."  "No, it's okay.  YOU go!"
"You first.  I insist!"  

"It's cool if we just wear our own
leather, right?"

Amity: While all the other students were debating who would be one of the 7 from their faction to run the relay race, no one in Amity volunteered.  They didn't want to take a spot from a friend who might want the honor.   They didn't care who won; they were just so darn happy to BE there!  

Dauntless:  They wouldn't sit down.  Or shut up.  Or notice when the entire gym was silent and staring at them, waiting for them to do both.  At one point they were chasing the Assistant Principal around the gym to see who was the fastest. They came dressed in their own black clothes, knee-high boots, and Batman sweatshirts.  When handed a leather jacket for the costume portion of the relay race, one dauntless heroine asked if she could just wear her own.  

Erudite: Before the black-market-trading portion of the faction relay activity, the Erudite plotted in secret.  They decided to hoard the materials they gathered.  True, they wouldn't need *everything* they got, but by keeping it to themselves they knew they'd be depriving other teams of points.  It was a manipulation the CRL never anticipated (we ruled it legal - it's not their fault they are smarter than we are).

Candor:  These guys ratted out the clever Erudite at the very first opportunity and complained (loudly) that it was unfair. 

Our HMMS cherubs answered questions that were written the night before by women running solely on desperation and caffeine, yet their answers resulted in factions that were so perfectly aligned with the novel that we could supply the filming of INSURGENT with more extras than they could possibly need.   

You can't make this stuff up. 

I guess that just about wraps up...oh... Abnegation?  Well, Abnegation finished second…but nobody noticed.