Thursday, September 07, 2006

School has been exhausting. This week has been full of drama, unfit for posting publicly. Suffice it to say seventh graders don't always consider the consequences of their actions. Or rarely. Maybe never.

I have collected a few funny kid stories so far this year. First, a conversation taking place outside my room. The kids are two fifth grade boys.

Kid A: Hey, man, in 5th grade everyone gets girlfriends!
Kid B: Girlfriends? No way! All they do is take all your allowance.
A: No they don't. Not that much...maybe 2 dollars a week.
B: Two dollars? I only get five! It's not worth it.
A: But everyone has one. I bet you can't get one in a month.
B: A month? You only start to make a friend in a month. I just met you three weeks ago and we're barely friends.

I tried to laugh quietly so they wouldn't get embarrased.

This morning I saw kid B again...to preface this story, our school has outdoor hallways. Each hallway has an overhang held up by poles. So I'm walking to my room, and Kid B is with another fifth grade boy by one of the poles. He's putting his left foot right next to the pole, so that the outside of his leg and foot are touching it. Then, he puts his right foot in front of that one, and grabs onto the pole. As I walk by I hear him say "And that's how you do a sit spin. You just grab onto the pole and do that."

I'm not sure if he was actually trying to teach the other kid pole dancing, but I was laughing so hard I couldn't have asked him if I wanted to.

3 comments:

Ruth said...

Bridget,

Just some sympathy from me on the drama of middle school.

I love your funny kid stories, too. :-)

Bridget said...

Thanks, Ruth. The funny kid stories are better than the dumb ones, like the kid today who said that Vietnam has "jungly tundra" and asked if Clinton was president during the Vietnam war.

Ruth said...

Yeah, you know, I find this one of the hardest things about teaching middle schoolers - the fact that they have no sense of the past whatsoever. It's not that horrifying that they wouldn't know who was president during the Vietnam War, but I get the impression that the past is just one large blob in their minds. They are old enough to discuss some really important issues, but they're too young to have any historical memory at all. They think anything more than two years ago is the distant past.

One of my students was talking the other day about seeing a really, really, really old movie. You picture a silent film in black and white, but no, it was Mr. Holland's Opus.

Last year when we read The Witch of Blackbird Pond, one of the kids said he didn't like it because it was set in the 1200s. Well, he was only 400 years off.