5th Graders

Those 5th graders have definitely become my favorites. It helps that I'm clearly their favorite, too. I finally led one of their classes Thursday while Florian took the extra time to finish grading their tests in the back of the room. Two things made it all worthwhile. The first was a reading exercise. The story involved some kid's computer essentially coming to life and talking to him and his grandmother, which neither of them seemed too surprised about. I presume Grandma's medicine cabinet had something to do with this -- whatever they were on, it was strong enough to cause shared hallucinations and yet simultaneously keep them mellow enough to chat amicably with a newly self-aware machine. I woulda freaked.

But the trippy plot isn't my point -- my point is that as the kids took turn reading, they automatically put on a robotic voice when speaking the part of the computer. It was hilarious. The only thing that could have topped that is if they had spontaneously busted out The Robot. I'm talkin' television musical here, like the entire class standing up, flattening their hands, and flailing around spasmodically the way the Tin Man might if he was in dire need of oil during a dance-off. It couldn't get any better than that.

Wow, I just figured out what my next lesson is going to be.

And the second thing that made it worthwhile was when we did an exercise on the months and seasons. I got to point to each one and have the entire class repeat after me. That is way too much fun. If that's what it takes to be a 5th grade teacher, maybe I need to rethink my entire life plan (shouldn't take long...done). I could never be an evil dictator, because if I were in charge there would be no oppression, there would be no warring, there would be no forced labor. There would be only repeating after me. Where's the harm in that?

And lastly, another incident that happened last week, also involving some of the 5th graders. Some of the girls had surrounded me on my way to a class on Wednesday, but I eventually deflected them. They must not have been very observant, because when I got to their class on Thursday, some of the same girls appeared before me with strange expressions and questions. I could tell they were talking about my goatee, and I finally calmed them down enough to figure out what they were asking: "Did you have that yesterday??"

...

"Yes, I had it yesterday. You must have missed it."

Followed by an even better question: "Is it real?"

...

Is it possible these girls recently uncovered The Great Santa Claus Hoax and are now trying to protect themselves from falling once again into the trap of fake facial hair? This is 5th grade, anything is possible.