Comments? Questions?

3 things my students said to me today:

1. "Ms. M., a fly landed on my head twice." What does one say to this? Seriously. Someone tell me.

2. "Ms. M., can I pay for my [$5] field trip in dimes?" Are you kidding me? I had to say yes. This kid is pooooor. So, yes, I accepted 50 dimes. Ugh.

3. "We don't have a garbage can." This was in response to an assignment I gave them to record anything that their family throws away in their home's "busiest" garbage can for a unit on conservation. It never occurred to me that a home would not have a garbage can.

Did I Really Just See That?

Okay, this has nothing to do with anything, but I MUST share this. Tonight at the gym, I walked into the locker room to hang up my coat. I saw a woman (who I've seen before) walking from the coat area into the sauna. Now, you can pretty much wear whatever you want in the sauna. The only rule is no nudity. Most people wear a towel or a bathing suit, but hell, I'm sure you could go in there fully clothed if you so wished.

Well, today I saw something I've never seen before. This woman, who is weird to begin with, (she's an older Asian woman with a bowl-cut hairdo who participates in step classes but stands aaaallll the way in the back and never goes along with the class, she just steps up and down for an hour) walks from the coat room to the sauna wearing a red neglige AND black knee-high boots. The sight stopped me dead in my tracks and my mouth stood agape. I walked into the coat room with my mouth still hanging open and my head turned in the direction of the sauna door thru which she had just disappeared and I heard my workout-friend's voice say, "I'm so glad someone else just saw that otherwise I wouldn't have believed it!"

What the hell? Uh, lady, you're in public!

And why was she coming from the coat room wearing that and not a dressing room. Was that what she was wearing under her coat?

I guess it's people like that who make things interesting, isn't it?

The Power

My kids ask me questions all day long. Most of them are related to what we're doing, some are just WAY out there and I wonder where the hell they come from. Some are obvious, some I can figure out with some logic, and some just stump me. (You may recall an earlier post about a question: "If one triplet dies, are the remaining two now known as twins?" I still don't know the answer to that one.

Today I got another stumper.

We've been reviewing literary genres. (Sidenote: How old were you when you learned the word "genre?" I probably didn't learn that word until college. The average first grader now uses that word. I kid you not.) Of course there are the 2 broad categories: fiction and non-fiction, but then you can break down each one into sub-categories such as historical fiction, fantasy, folk tales, biographies, informational, etc. I know you know all this. I just feel the need to make sure everyone's on the same page.

One of my boys is reading a book about Bionicles. Bionicles are a creation of the Lego company. They look like aliens and each one has its own defensive and offensive properties. That's all I can tell you. (Follow the link, nerds, to learn more). So the book my kid is reading is a book describing each character in a certain "class" of Bionicle beasts, the Rahi (it's all very complex). So my kid asks me, "Ms. M, this book is informational, so it's non-fiction, but it's about characters that don't exist, so it's fantasy, too. What genre is it?"

Now I have no problem admitting when I don't know something. In fact, I hate it when people pass off their guesses as fact because they don't want to appear to not know everything in the entire world.

"Uhhhh..." was my first response.

"Let me see the book" was my second response.

"To be honest, I'm not sure" was my third response.

My fourth and best response: "If we HAD to stick the 'the rules,' we would probably classify it as fantasy, but since we're creative people, let's make up our own genre. What do you think?"

After some discussion, we came up with "informational fiction." He seemed genuinely intrigued at the idea that things could be flexible, that we, as readers, hell, as people, could do crazy things like make up a genre! If we can create a genre, what else can we do???

Isn't it that kind of thinking that creates new and wonderful ideas? I mean, how powerful for a child to be able to create something like that, cuz when you think about it, children are pretty powerless in their everyday lives: they are told how and when to do absolutely EVERYTHING.

I think I opened a mind today.

Q and A Jitters

Today we had musicians visit our classroom. They were part of an orchestra we heard play yesterday. Did I blog about that? I can't even remember. They say it's the pregnancy. I hope so, cuz my forgetfulness is getting to be a real problem. Seriously. In fact, let me go off on a tangent and tell a little story about this:

Saturday night I had a dream in which I was very forgetful. The whole dream was about me trying to find something, finding it, and then forgetting what I did with it. It was exhausting. Sunday morning, I told my husband, "I'm so forgetful, I'm having dreams in which I'm forgetful!" and proceeded to tell him about my dream. Later on that same day, probably not even 5 hours later, I piped up, "God, I'm so forgetful lately. I even had a dream last night in which I was forgetful." He about peed in his pants. I forgot that I had told him. Pathetic.

Aaaaanyway...back to the musicians. When my kids are open to Q and A sessions that do not involve me doing the Q'ing or A'ing, I get a little nervous. This is because some of my kids ask the stupidest questions imagineable. No, not all of them. In fact, the first two kids picked to ask questions asked very intelligent questions. The third...not so much. The short musical session taught them about how music moved to the "New World" in the 1700s since there were no recording devices. A flutist (flautist?) and violinist gave the talk and played samples of music from the time. Here are their questions:

Student 1: Shit, I can't remember her question. (Told you).

Student 2: "Back in the 1700s, would they have been playing a metal flute? Wouldn't it have been made out of wood?" (I was so proud!)

Student 3: "Do you know where I can get an African knife?"

Uh, WHAT? Hello???? We are talking about music here! Yes, there was some mention about music slaves sang, but NOTHING about knives. wtf???

Thank god they cut off the questions after that, because after one kid goes off-topic, it's like a free-for-all.

Time for Glasses?

We went on a field trip today to the University of Chicago to hear the St. Paul Chamber Orchestra. It was a great performance geared toward children to help them understand classical music a bit better, important because this is probably the one time a year they get to hear it. So I'm sitting in the audience with my kids, next to this one particularly chatty girl who says just about anything that pops into her head.

At one point in the performance, some additional musicians come out for a certain piece, including a pianist. This guy was an older over-weight gentleman who resembled Richard Attenborough.

The talkative girl next to me excitedly yells out, "Ms. M!!! Is that Bill Clinton????" Then she squints and says disappointedly, "Oh, no, it's not."

Sorry, Bill.

What's So Funny?

I've written before about how one of the things I love about kids is their randomness. They're kind of "all over the place," make funny mistakes because they don't have all the information put together right yet, and also have this insatiable curiosity to know things most adults gave up wondering about a long time ago.

The other day, one of my kids asked me (out of the blue, mind you): "Ms. M, if there were triplets and one of them died, would they be twins?" What? Uh, I don't know. No? Maybe? These kinds of things I'm amused by.

However, kids have to realize that they don't have to share every thought that pops into their head...especially in the middle of a lesson.

Today during math (which I'm kind of freaking out about because I feel we're behind and the ISATs are MARCH 3rd!), we were going over our homework. At the end I asked if there were any questions. Some kids asked smart questions like, "I don' t understand why #8 is 3.5." (Okay, technically not a question, but...). Some asked annoying questions like, "Can you repeat the answers to #4, 5, 6, and 7?" (Grrrrrr!). I felt like I was becoming visibly annoyed with all the (annoying-type) questions, but apparently I wasn't, because a student raised her hand and said, "I think it's funny that the answer to #4 is 5 and the answer to #5 is 4."

Is this not a thought that one could keep to themselves? I mean, really! Didn't I JUST get done saying how I felt we were moving too slowly in math and we need to speed things up? Oh, and how come you weren't amused that the answer to #3 was 3? Now, THAT'S funny!

Randomness

What I really want to write today:

zzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz

But I will actually post something "worthwhile" since I haven't posted for several days. I feel like writing "zzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz" because being a teacher is CRAZY sometimes. At some points during the day, I literally have 5 people talking to me: 5 people who don't understand that I cannot understand one thing they're saying so they just stare at me when they're done asking their question as if they're waiting for a response. Sometimes I have them form a line so I can hear their questions one at a time (like normal people). Sometimes I just give them all a blanket answer like, "Go sit down." I think the latter is best because my kids tell me the stupidest things. Like today we were talking about the "Twelve Days of Christmas" because that is the song that they are performing at our holiday assembly. I told them about how the 12 days of Christmas were actually the 12 days following Christmas leading up to the Epiphany on January 6. One of my girls was practically jumping out of her seat, waving her arm in a frenzy so I would call on her. When kids behave that way, I won't call on them and I let her know that. She put her hand down and pouted.

Later, when we were doing something else, I was standing by her desk working with another student and she interrupted (out of the blue) to tell me what she had wanted to share earlier. I told her it was neither the time nor the place to tell me something. So the poor thing waited until after dismissal to finally come up to me and tell me the EXTREMELY IMPORTANT information that had her jumping out of her chair: Her little sister's birthday is on January 5th, the day before Epiphany. Wow. What the hell am I supposed to say to that?

Sometimes I feel like my classroom is the chaos of the trading floor at the stock exchange: too many things going on at once. In fact, my dentist tells me that he sees people in 2 professions come in with a glazed look on their face after a day of work: stockbrokers and teachers.