Published: July 9, 2008

The Short, Happy Lives of Teachers

As we climb over the hump of summer toward a new school-year horizon, it’s a good time to share this fun (and often illuminating) activity we tried out recently in the Teacher Leaders Network discussion group.

The idea came from a newspaper feature describing a trend toward "succinct prose." The story cited a recent book published by Smith Magazine which carried the intriguing title, Not Quite What I Was Planning: Six-Word Memoirs by Writers Famous and Obscure .

As the feature story noted, this and similar collections of extremely short prose have been inspired by a six-word novel said to have been written by Ernest Hemingway on a dare. The novel read: "For sale:...