Class started by the students exchanging their homework journal writings. They were instructed to read and respond to their partner’s journal entry. The students wrote independently for about ten minutes before the students exchanged journals again and read the response their partner wrote to them. After a couple minutes to read the responses, the teacher asked the whole class if anyone said anything funny or surprising. The teacher called on individual students to talk about what they read briefly. I thought this activity was a good way to get the creative juices flowing in class. While the topic of the journal writing was personal (what did you do last weekend?), the writing seemed to serve as a way for students to practice producing written work while not being afraid of making mistakes (as the journals were not “corrected” but discussed). I could see the journal exchanging being good for class rapport as well because it allowed students to interact with classmates in a casual, personal way. Even as a native speaker, I found free-writing/journal writing tasks in my English classes to be beneficial, if only to “clear my creative spring” as one of my professors once put it.