Riddles

Many things have happened since I last blogged, blog. A school year ended. A school year started. I directed another musical, vowed once again never to direct another musical, and have since started the process of planning our next musical. I got a bike and became moderately proficient at the ukulele. I have a new class of 27 pubescent darlings and so far I have had zero phone mishaps with their parents.* We have had three field trips, including one that was overnight and one where several kids fell in a river. We just sent home first trimester report cards and I'm in that weird brain space where everything I think turns into a third-person report card comment about my own life (M. is making steady progress in her dental hygiene. Her main goal moving forward is to develop a consistent habit of flossing every day). And, somewhere in there, I ran the following experiment on the children.

My co-teacher and I posted this on the projector:

Your goal: Every single student in the class will have the correct answer to the riddle written clearly on their own piece of paper. Your teachers will not answer any questions or make any comments.

The Riddle:

• A man has to get a fox, a chicken, and a sack of corn across a river.
• He has a rowboat, and it can only carry him and one other thing.
• If the fox and the chicken are left together, the fox will eat the chicken.
• If the chicken and the corn are left together, the chicken will eat the corn.
• How does the man do it?

Then we walked silently to the back of the room and sat. And they started raising their hands. And we sat. And more of them started raising their hands. And we sat. And they turned around and looked at us and raised their hands more aggressively. And we sat. They were more silent than when they are supposed to be silent.

Eventually, they remembered that they are capable of talking, and they tried to collaborate to solve the puzzle. All in all, they worked together better than last year's class, to whom we posed the same challenge, and who just yelled at each other for fifteen minutes despite the fact that several of them had done the puzzle the year before in a special math group and knew the answer from the beginning. So, it was better than that. But did they achieve their goal? I will let you judge that for yourself based on this selection of my favorite responses:

That is specifically the thing he cannot do.

Such a seamless transition from meticulous logic to animal cruelty.

This one is sideways because I don't know how to use a computer, but I love everything about it and you should turn your head to read it. Are you also picturing a giant ear of corn wearing water wings?

This poor fox!

You got it.

It is good to remember, when I am starting to feel frustrated at a student who is behaving in a counter-productive or illogical way, that logic can be subjective. Perhaps the student who perpetually loses her homework and then insists that it is actually being stolen from the turn-in bin is just stuffing the fox in the sack, so to speak.

Or, you know... pig.

* However, if last year is any indication, I am due for one soon. A couple months after the pilgrim incident, I called a different student's mom, thinking I was calling back my own brother, and led with "Sorry, I just had to Snapchat a picture of a vanity plate" rather than, "Hello." These people trust me with their children.

When teachers text

Here's a text I sent last night:

I'm taking the cheese outside. I'm a pilgrim.

This was a pretty weird text to send my friend Sarah.

It was a REALLY weird text to send, by accident, not to my friend Sarah but the parent of one of my students.

I mean just inconceivably, mind-bendingly, authority-jeopardizingly weird.

Now I will over-analyze this situation in six paragraphs.

First, some context, which is more of a luxury than I provided to Ms. P, my student's parent: A couple weeks ago the fridge in my classroom broke. I came in one morning to find a grayish-brownish puddle on the floor and when I opened the mini-fridge it emitted a smell that made me question every life choice that had led me to that moment. I spent a few minutes trying to clean it out, but then I got light-headed from the combination of holding my breath and thinking about fungus, so I gave up and just posted a sign that said "Do not open! It will make our classroom smell!!" with a sad face. Of course the kids all begged to open it, but, seeing my pallor, even they eventually understood the gravity of the situation. The fridge was removed and disposed of. Yesterday afternoon, after many fridgeless days, our fantastic building manager brought in a brand new mini-fridge and we were good to go.

Then I came home and the fridge in my apartment was broken.

Luckily, it being winter in New England, my roommate and I were able to preserve our perishables by putting them in a bucket on a snowy ledge in the back of our building. I thought the night had reached its apex of absurdity when I was placing my food in a bucket outside. I was wrong.

Please note that I am very careful about texting. I am not exaggerating, for once, when I say that I have not texted a wrong number by accident since I was maybe fourteen, if ever. I had a traumatic situation on AIM once as a preteen (though wasn't every situation on AIM as a preteen traumatic?) and it taught me nothing if not mindfulness. If I have sent a mistext ever since, it has been mundane enough to not even register in memory. It surely did not include the words "cheese" or "pilgrim," certainly not both of them, and it was not sent to the parents of any of my students.

Why was this parent's phone number in my text log, you ask? Well, we'd been texting the day before about her son's grades on his recent reading quizzes, which none of us were pleased with. I love when parents choose to communicate via text or email, since I feel like it allows us to check in with each other more frequently, and being a millennial, I never learned to communicate with other humans using my voice; the whole concept makes me uneasy. But this text exchange had actually become slightly tense, due to some unimportant and uninteresting logistical misunderstanding about my class' reading quizzes, and we had decided we should chat in person when she came to pick up her son the next day. The chat was quick and productive and resolved all prior tension and confusion. We left with a plan of action, and all of us, student, parent, and teacher, were on the same page.

And then, three hours later, I texted Ms. P that I was a pilgrim who wanted to take the cheese outside.

Here are some more thoughts I have about this text: Cheese is the cheapest joke-fodder in the Western hemisphere. If I were trying to make up a scenario about a parent-teacher text gaffe, I would be tempted to invent a text message about cheese, and then I would say no, too cheap. I never even buy cheese! I'm, like, 73% vegan and this is the first time I've bought a block of cheese in about six months. But sometimes, I see now, the cheese joke finds you. You wake up one day and you realize you were inside the cheese joke all along.

To answer your final question, I don't know what I meant about the pilgrim. Putting your cheese in the snow just seems like something a pilgrim would do? I think I read that once? It was just the kind of thing you say in a text to your friend Sarah when you're not thinking very hard or paying very much attention to what you're typing... or whom you're typing it to.

Now if you'll excuse me I am going to eat some olives from a snow-bucket. I'm a caveman.

The Stirrings

The time has come.

My sixth grade ELA class is reading The Giver.

If you have been to middle school in the past 20 years, you have read The Giver and it has changed your life. If you don't think it changed your life, you just haven't realized yet. I didn't know The Giver had changed my life until I reread it a couple months ago (having not read it since seventh grade) and it dawned on me that all of my ideas about what the future (or, now, present) should be like have come from this dystopian little gem of a YA novel.

I'll get back to The Giver in a moment, but I have to digress to share my most deeply held belief. If you are reading this you are probably a person I know, and if you are a person I know, we have probably had this debate. And you have strongly disagreed with me. But you have not diminished my resolve, and now I am going to write this on my blog and I'll fight the whole internet over it. Here is my belief:

It is super weird and archaic that we still give birth to babies.

Imagine that you were cryogenically frozen in the 17th century. Now look around you in the year 2014. Everything is absolute magic. iPads! 3D printers! People wearing spandex clothes, like astronauts! Astronauts! Cryogenic technology! It is all just impossible.

"How do you get from place to place?" you ask.

"Well, we have these airplanes that can fly across the entire country in like 6 hours, and rapid transit systems that can cross an entire city in 30 minutes," answers the spandex-wearing person.

"How do you nourish yourselves?" you ask.

"We take this one box and put it in this other box and press a button on the second box and it comes out as food. It takes about 90 seconds," says the ostensible astronaut.

"How do you perpetuate the species?" you ask.

"Oh... we carry our young in in our wombs for 9 months and then birth them out of ourselves... basically the same way it's been done for all of human history," responds your crazy new future friend while capturing a moving picture of herself on her mysterious glowing brick. Womp.

Another thing that is super weird and archaic is weather. If I haven't mentioned this yet, we are living in the year 2014. We can clone mammals. I don't understand what the Higgs Boson is, but we discovered that. And yet we still have to deal with rain?

I'm not saying these are easy problems (yes, childbirth and weather are both problems) to solve. I'm just saying, this is not how I pictured life in the mid-teens of the third millennium AD.

Which brings me back to The Giver. Namely this:

"The first Ceremony began right on time, and Jonas watched as one after another each newchild was given a name and handed by the Nurturers to its new family unit."

And this:

"But what happened to those thing? Snow, and the rest of it?"
"Climate Control. Snow made growing food difficult, limited the agricultural periods. And unpredictable weather made transportation almost impossible at times. It wasn't a practical thing, so it became obsolete."

Oops. All of my ideas about how an advanced society should operate are dystopian. And were planted in my head at age twelve by a YA novel.

And now, as a reading teacher, I proudly pass this baton to a  new generation of twelve-year-olds. The dystopian future is now.


Speaking of twelve-year-olds, another great thing about The Giver is when the preteens in the book start having wet dreams ("the Stirrings") and have to take pills  for them. Sometimes I can't tell if my kids are so mature that they don't laugh at things like this, or if they're so immature that they don't realize they should laugh at things like this, or if they have really poor reading comprehension, which is more concerning. In any case, I posed this question in a class discussion on Thursday: "Does Jonas want to keep having these dreams, or does he want them to stop?" I knew I needed to call on a child strategically, so I called on a sweet boy whom I am going to refer to here simply as Kitten, because that is what he is. Kitten's response:

"I think Jonas wants to keep having these dreams because they give him pleasure. Jonas is pleasured by the dreams."

No. One. Laughed.

(Except for the two other teachers overhearing my lesson, who laughed a lot.)

Are the kids amazingly professional and mature? Nope. They're just sort of bad at vocabulary. Neither Kitten nor the rest of the class understood the nuanced difference between "pleased" and "pleasured." So to everyone in the room under thirteen, all Kitten had said was that the dreams were pretty nice.

You guys get to work on the childbirth and weather issues, and I'll start making my class some vocab flashcards.