Yesterday Facebook reminded me of a memory from teaching fourth grade in Ecuador. We had been doing labs in science, and we went all in, with lab coats, name tags and goggles. One day, my students decided to act like small children, not in maturity, but in stature. They pulled their arms into their lab coats and took off their shoes, kneeling on them. Indeed, they looked like even smaller scientists that they already were.
The following encounter with students went something like this: Student 1: I invented this move. Me: Brilliant! But wait… kids did that when I was a kid. You mean to tell me that you were alive when I was your age?!? Student 1: *GASP* I was NOT alive then! Okay, maybe I didn’t invent it. Student 2: I was alive then. I was a teeny tiny, itsy bitsy atom (aside #1: we had been learning about molecules) floating around in the universe. And then, my mom ate me, and I wiggled my way down her esophagus, next to her trachea (aside #2: we had just studied diagrams and one happened to be about the human body), into her stomach, and- Me: Okay then! No more small people. Everyone, grow your little arms and legs back out because this conversation is taking some unexpected turns. You should know Student 2 did not think this is how babies are created. And yet, that was not a discussion I wanted erupting at 1:25 during our science lab. That being said, if this was one Aesop’s fables, the moral would be as follows: Watch your back or you might inadvertently eat a floating baby atom and get pregnant.
2 Comments
Celia
3/12/2023 12:25:11 am
Such a great conversation. Yes those conversations have a way of going on a completely different tangent!
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