Materials arrived yesterday afternoon from Evan-Moor Educational Publishers. I’ve taken on a job creating a language arts workbook for a series they are publishing. It started as a puzzle gig, and I’m still kind of looking at it as such. I think it’s easy to blur the line between recreational puzzles and language arts exercises, and it seems the publisher is as keen to do this as I am. Best of all, they’ve given me grade 6, so I won’t have to hold back the challenge factor.

When I was a kid, when my friends and I got home from school, we would often play School. Okay, how nerdy were we? Maybe it’s because my parents were teachers. (Hey, I wasn’t as bad as my sister; she also like playing Store, but she always had to be the cashier because she liked counting change. Apparently, I wasn’t a shopper in those days. Store didn’t excite me.) Seriously, three of us older kids divvied up the younger kids, made worksheets for them, and taught them. For fun.

Now someone’s paying me to do it.