If you are a parent, or have worked with kids in any capacity, you are probably already well aware that children have no filter. Having grown up as a dog-walker (leaving the babysitting to my brother), my interactions with young children were fairly limited. Which is why in my teaching job, where I work with kids from ages three to thirteen, I am sometimes at a loss for words at the ideas they drum up. Below is a list of interactions I've had that have left me either scratching my head, recoiling in poorly veiled horror, or chuckling to myself. Enjoy.
As mentioned in a pervious post, on my first day of class, a student gave himself a haircut. He had taken the name tag taped to his desk and thought it was funny to tape it to his head. I turned around just in time to watch as, in near slow motion, he raised the scissors to the tape he had stuck in his hair, and cut. I sent him out to an LA to deal with the new chop and still stuck tape bits.
While grading papers, I was summoned to a desk not to check finished problems but to inspect something entirely different. My student yelled "Teacher Look!" and stuck his finger as close to my face as he could. On any given day a finger nearly jabbing you in the eye is a bit startling, but even more so when said finger is capped off by three ginormous boogers. I had no words, simply turning away to grade another eager students paper.
On my first day with my brand new ESL class, before I could even get the students settled in their seats I had one child who wrapped her arms around my legs and professed that she loved me. I'm not in the habit of declaring love to people I've just met, but when she proffered a bit of chocolate candy along with the love...I took the bribe, patted her on the head and told her class was about to begin and she needed to take her seat.
The one thing I dread most in this line of work is kindergarten. It's only an hour long class, so it should be the best class to teach. But as previously mentioned, young children and I get go together like oil and water. And our kindy class has children as young as three years old. So needless to say, I was already intimidated by the class and things just went downhill when I came up with the brilliant idea of playing Quack Diddly Oso (for those not familiar, you sit in a circle, sing a song, and clap hands around the circle). First, it was hard to corral the children into a circle on the floor. Then, to my horror, the child sitting on my right, and thus responsible for clapping my hand with his, was sick. I watched, yet again in slow motion, as the claps went around the circle. The boy next to me stuck his fingers up his nose and procured a couple boogers, sneezed full force into his palm, threw in a cough for good measure and then slapped said hand down onto my waiting palm. There wasn't enough hand sanitizer in the world to clean off that germ cocktail.
While teaching a lesson on facial features (eyebrows, beard, ponytail, bangs, braid) none of my students had a braid which I could use as an example. So, I loosed my hair from its bun and in a matter of seconds had braided it in one long braid. My students awe quickly turned from "wow, teacher so quick" to "Elsa". My hair isn't platinum blonde by any means, but once the connection was made, the classroom was lost in chants of "Teacher Elsa!" "Elsa, teacher, Elsa!"They couldn't let it go, but at least they had learned the vocabulary.
I was informed on break that one of my students had left the classroom with blood gushing out of her mouth. Since I was on break, that was decidedly not my problem, but I was on the lookout when I went back to class. Everything seemed normal. I was grading a students workbook when she pushed something onto the page. It happened to be a tooth. Her tooth, freshly excavated and still covered in blood. I closed my eyes, attempting to hold down my dinner, and told her that until she removed the tooth, she would not get her book checked. (Apparently right now it tooth-losing season. I've since had two more students lose teeth in my class and a couple more show me some hanging on by a thread.)
These are just a couple of the more memorable moments as a teacher. I'm sure that I will continue to be surprised by what they come up with until the day my contract is over.