Ah, the sonnet. What could be better than watching my students clap their fingers together or stomp their feet trying to dicern where the accent falls in a word? What is more refreshing than watching students count syllables hoping that they will add up to ten? What better than watching as they smile when they finally figure out what ABAB CDCD EF EF GG means? Or wagging their fingers shouting "it's a rhyiming couplet," pleased as punch that they know what that means? Or giggling when I say, "thou must deposit thy gum in the receptacle." These are the days when I love my job. Kids love poetry, for some reason, they aren't turned off by it, they like the idea of it and they feel that they can do it. Sure, their poems are trite, but at least they are trying. How many adults sit down and write sonnets at night? Better still, I hear them in the hallways, correcting each other about the patterns, teasing each other about inept rhymes. I'm hooked. I even got a few to admit that Shakespeare was the original G. Now that's progress.