Last week the school’s itinerant counselor was in and gave a lesson in problem solving and decision making to one of my classes. The basic scenario was: you’re stranded in the desert and have access to a limited number of supplies that you can recover from your wrecked vehicle. A magnetic compass was among the possible items to take.
Counselor (C): “Do you think a magnetic compass is important for survival?”
Student (S): “No.”
C: “Why not?”
S: Because you don’t have a refrigerator, duh!”
This little bit of gold happened yesterday and I can’t help but relate it, hopefully you get to laugh half as hard as I did.
Yesterday two of my students came over to visit and one of them brought their little brother (who is elementary school aged) along. We’re sitting around talking and playing Wii Bowling when out of the blue, the young boy asks me, “Do you have a girlfriend?”
Unsure of how much of my personal life I really want to relate to the kids (and by extension, the whole village) I responded, “What do you think.” What followed was a rapid exchange that left me laughing hysterically:
“Yes.”
“Why do you think that?”
“Because you’re pretty!”
So there I am, a 23-year old male teacher with two female students and one male student in my apartment hanging out. And one of them tells me I’m pretty. For a split second I could almost feel the news article in the Nome Nugget announcing the end of my teaching career. Then I realized, “I’m in the Bush, he’s an Eskimo, and it’s not the girls saying this, it’s a younger boy – time to clarify.”
So, I did the only thing I could think, I shot him a quizzical stare. Thankfully, he picked up on it.
“Lots of the girls say you’re pretty! Irene, …”
And then, well, then I started laughing so hard that I didn’t catch the rest of the names.
Kids say the darndest things.
Every week, I work with my social studies classes to learn maps. My Intro to US class is learning all of the states and in addition to names, capitals and abbreviations, I’m trying to teach them a little bit about the history of each state. This week, we added Utah to our maps and I touched on Mormonism and mentioned that they had to give up polygamy to become a state.
After explaining what polygamy was to a group of middle-schoolers, one of them piped up: “But wouldn’t they run out of women?” I nodded my head. “So some of the men would have to marry men?”
Moments like that, when I can hardly stop myself from falling on the floor laughing are what keep me going.