I don't mind my students

I recently assigned my 8th grade students a project which was to provide closure to their first semester with me. A semester in which they wrote descriptions, made up stories and were creative. The assignment, inspired by a prompt from Peace Begins with Us, the Romania Peace Corps publication integrating student's creativity and Volunteers experiences, was to write a story about your life if Romania were occupied by foreign forces. I introduced the prompt with a lesson in which we as a class wrote a short story on the blackboard and then assigned the prompt to be due in one week. Later that week, my Romanian english teacher counterpart came up to me and said that some of my students were very confused and overwhelmed by the assignment. So the stories that were supposed to be due in a week became due in a month with an extra few weeks for me to help the students correct their own papers before they handed in their final copies. Despite my emphasis on story-telling and creativity, many of the papers I have received are dry text-book translations of life in Romania during World War II. Two papers have made me laugh and smile and love my students. With very minor corrections:
Extraterrestrial Florin wrote:
Romania is occupied by foreign forces who are from the planet Mars. Their soldiers are called martians. They arrived in Romania with the help of modern spaceships. Martians have the power to take any form of people, so they have created a total confusion among Romanians. Anyways, these powers could be used up at 12 a.m.
After this time, Martians turn into very ugly creatures and each had a speaker costume. First Romanian territory conquered by martians was the capital of Romania, Bucuresti. Martians attacked only until 12 so that their mission was much easier being that they looked like ordinary people. In one week Romanian army was abolished in fully. Now the martians walk the streets all country, causing chaos and panic among the Romanians because of their ugly faces. Martians have decided to take hostages for their experiments, in which they try to learn more about people. In the end they took all Romanians to Mars. Here, everyone was used in experiments. Martians poke fun of their failed experiments. People are transformed into creatures aimed to amuse the martians. In all this time, Romania has transformed into a place where only wild animals live.

Radu and his surprise, if abrupt, ending:

Last year Romania has been occupied by America because it has more money and natural resources. The president Bush, talking with Basescu [Romanian president] to kill people.

People are very scared because they wouldn't have water and food.

The president is run to the country of America.

The conflict zone is: Maresti and Cluj. We are defeated because America has more tanks and avions [airplanes].

The life is not very good because people die every day and doctors are killed.

The hero of this war is the new president of America, Obama, because he stop the war and now the countrys are friends.