It was a copy of several copies, it wasn’t something we’d studied and I didn’t have the answers. It kept the students mesmerized, though, so it did its job.

This week and part of next week we have pass back classes for our first and second year junior high school classes. Because the actual pass back part takes only a few minutes, we are left with at least a half-hour’s worth of time to fill.

This year some of us decided to pass out word searches that involved matching capitols and countries and then finding the capitols in the word search. It had nothing to do with anything we’d studied, but it was something to do.

I made it optional, as the students already have homework for the next grade even though they haven’t, technically, finished the current one, but almost every student grabbed a copy and each class became eerily silent as the students tried to finish the word search.

My job was to translate the over-copied words into letters the students could understand.

This means, of course, that complicated word searches will always be a part of pass back classes.