Same assignment, most Novembers: students interview someone, write a feature, hand it in before break. It worked fine. But I’d started to suspect "fine" was the ceiling of an assignment I’d landed on early and never revisited — and I wanted a version that gave students an actual reason to care beyond the due date.
I couldn’t find one that kept the real skills intact while giving the assignment a sharper emotional hook. So I built it around gratitude instead.
See it on Teachers Pay Teachers — $4.40
Students interview and profile someone at school they’re genuinely thankful for — the people who keep the building running that nobody thinks to thank. Same core skills I was already teaching — interview technique, feature structure, AP style, lead writing — but the framing gives students an actual reason to care about the piece beyond "it’s due Friday." A fifteen-slide teaching presentation, a full assignment sheet, and a rubric with a scored example so grading isn’t a guessing game.
It’s not that my old version was broken. It’s that I’d stopped asking whether there was a better one, and it turned out there was — one that turns the same skills practice into something that also makes someone’s day.
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