Miss, how old are you?

Twenty-three. But the point here is I look young. I know.

The other day, at dismissal, a middle schooler turned to me, said, "you look like a teenager!" and then scampered away. It was weird because he is a teenager.

My students often ask how I old I am. This is a great opportunity to give them a mental math puzzle (I am 3 times 5, minus 8, plus the square root of, et cetera) but I don't like the moment where they figure out my age in front of me. It makes me feel like I'm Rumplestiltskin in the end of the story when he accidentally reveals his name and turns back into a spinning wheel or whatever. So lately I just say: "I will give you one clue. I was born in the year the Berlin Wall fell."

Fifth graders say "you were born in 2001?" because they think "something something fell" means the Twin Towers. Are you more impressed that they know, off the top of their heads, the year the Twin Towers fell, or disconcerted that they are guessing the year they themselves were born?

Kindergartners say "I do not know what that is." The consensus among the kindergartners is that I am either 15 or 16. They are closer than the fifth graders.

A second grader guessed 47 and I didn't refute it.

Speaking of coming of age, later in the year we will have sex ed. This will be a hilarious time for you and me both, blog. I got a sneak preview of the impending awkwardness recently when one of the fifth graders came to me during independent reading block and said "I need help with these two words." This student struggles with English and is working hard to improve. Right now she is reading a nonfiction book about life in prison. She pointed to the two words. They were "penis and scrotum."  The best part is she was actually retained in fifth grade, meaning she has already had sex ed, meaning there's about a 50/ 50 chance that she knew the words and just has a really creepy sense of humor.

Inadvertent poetry by fifth graders

The other day I read this line at the end of a fifth grader's book summary and realized it is probably the most beautiful sentence anyone has ever written. And she was just trying to be matter-of-fact:

"And there they were standing there in the past going nowhere because there was nowhere to go."

Since then I've been noticing the inadvertently poetic phrases that come out of children's writing. Fifth graders play with grammar (and spelling) in ways that e.e. cummings would envy... and they don't even know they're doing it. This week I accidentally wrote a vocabulary test that was too hard. On the bright side, it resulted in a lot of inadvertent poetry.

(All grammar is sic., spelling and capitalization is not sic.)


Write a meaningful sentence using the word scarcity:

"The scarcity of god is large."
(He meant gold, but this is so much better.)


Define and give the part of speech for the word pitiful:

"Noun -- you're in bad shape and something small."

"Noun -- people are pitiful sometimes."
(Please read directions. But also, very nice.)


Not poetry, but here is my favorite unintentionally antisemitic line:

"The Jews think that they have dignity."
(The kids are reading a Holocaust book. He's trying to say the opposite of what it sounds like, I promise).


Also not poetry, but here are my three favorite spellings of the words philosopher:
1. Phalafaser
2. Flastifer
3. Flosper


And here are my favorite surrealist/ terrifying lines:

Write a meaningful sentence using the word secede:

"I secede from the skunk in the old days."

"I seceded back into my mom because I didn't want to come out."

(I have NO idea.)

Poll: Should I eat this piece of chocolate a 6-year-old gave me from her backpack?*

I am doing my best not to turn this into a Kids Say The Darndest Things blog. I worry that sharing kid quotes is the teacher-blog equivalent of showing people pictures of your toddler or recounting your trip to Europe, i.e., they're not as cute as you think they are, and you had to be there.

But I do think the quote below is pretty darn'd.

Michael Jackson's life, in one run-on sentence, as summarized by a 6-year-old: "First his grandfather had a long gun and and then he made music and then he looked like a woman and then he had to go to the hospital. Oh, and when he looked like a woman he turned white."

Can anyone verify that grandfather/ gun part? I have no idea what she's talking about, but it's more than possible that I'm less hip than a 6-year-old.

I think I have devoted an inordinate amount of blog space to the lower elementary kids I work with in the afterschool program, as opposed to the fifth graders whom I actually teach. Lest you get the mistaken impression that I aspire to teach little ones, let me clarify: I will never teach lower elementary. You may mark these words.

They're cute and all, but I could never do what K-2 teachers do. And I don't mean that in the patronizing way that people say "I could never do what you do" when really they mean "I don't want to do what you do, and I don't understand why anyone would." I think teaching children who can barely control their own bladders to read and be students is totally rad. People think of primary education as easy, compared to older grades, because the content knowledge is so basic. But that's exactly the problem. I have no idea how to conceptualize and explain something like addition. I had to confront this while trying to help a first grader with his homework last week. If you want me to teach you how to convert a fraction into a decimal using long division, no problem. I can conceptualize why that's tricky. I can predict what mistakes you will make. I can think through the process and explain to you the steps and why/ how they work. But addition? This is how I teach addition: "Add these numbers. No, I said add them. Stop. You're subtracting. Add. Are you sure you're adding?" At this point the kid is basically a random number generator. Finally he lands on the right number. "You did it!" I say, even though, as far as I know, he didn't. And we move on. Good thing he didn't have reading homework; I probably would have used a lot of expletives.

The last story I'm going to tell about afterschool (today) is how last week during story time, one of the kids called out "what's that red light??" and pointed toward the ceiling behind me. I turned around and saw nothing, so I said "I don't see anything.... and raise your hand, please." A couple seconds later, another kid called out: "There! That light" Again I looked behind me. Nothing. "I really don't see anything," I said, and kept reading. A few seconds later, all 15-ish of them, overlapping and hysterical: "There!!! The red light!!!" I turn and stare for maybe 30 seconds. Nothing. They insist they are all still seeing it. I feel like a skeptic during the Salem witch trials. "Well, it's clearly a magical light that only children can see," I say. This is apparently a sufficient answer; they nod their heads and let me finish the story uninterrupted. On the one hand I felt bad for sort of lying to them but on the other hand... I wasn't lying.


*Trick question, already did.

At least it's not a negative slope!

Why did I call this blog The Teaching Curve? Because every other pun on the words "teaching," "learning," "class," or "school," is even more unoriginal, and calling my blog Nice White Lady seemed too irreverent. But also, the title is supposed to reflect the idea that teaching is something you improve at over time.* It's a made-not-born thing. In other words:

You will suck at this at first. For a while, actually.

I am lucky to be at a school that takes the job of developing new teachers very seriously. But that doesn't mean I can't still find countless ways to be terrible on a daily basis. I watch videos of myself teaching, and it's just thirty minutes of me thinking "what am I doing with my hands?!" (weird signals that mean nothing to my students) and "what is Jon doing with his hands?!" (some sort of dubstep? Certainly not simplifying this fraction). I recently made two kids cry in a Lunchables-related altercation that I don't even want to get into. I am not being self-deprecating. New teachers should look incompetent next to their veteran colleagues--that's how we know the more senior teachers have made progress.** That's what gives us role models. Still, some days, at the end of the day, my feeling is... I just want to be good at this already!

I asked a couple of teachers who have several years on me when that feeling ends. They laughed: "Never." I have heard rumors that it gets easier after year ten.

So, we savor the small successes. For example: this morning I defeated the robot! (Wait, what? It's not healthy to conceptualize teaching as a daily battle between yourself and cyborg-children?) Mitzie and two other first graders were using their sporks as airplanes, catapults, and airplane-catapults. I may be a novice teacher but I know a corneal abrasion threat when I see one. I positive-framingly encouraged them to think about how mature first graders behave. Without missing a beat, Mitzie responded: "I'm sorry. I will make smarter choices." (Yes, verbatim.)  Ding ding ding!

Also, the student of mine who hated me most last year (so, obviously, the student I've stayed closest to this year--if this theme is not familiar, you clearly did not watch the video linked under "Nice White Lady") recently admitted that I have swag. This is true.

I will leave you with a fun fact I just learned (taught) in social studies: Did you know that America's original penny, designed by Benjamin Franklin, was imprinted with the phrase "MIND YOUR BUSINESS"? This is hilarious to fifth graders and their novice teachers alike.

*Calm down, fellow social science majors: I know this is not an accurate match for what the graph of a learning curve represents. But seriously, it was this or "Teachers Have Class!"

**Someone please teach me how to type an em-dash on Blogger.