Kirylin’s Voice

I’ve been sitting on this challenge a bit longer than normal for two reasons. First, between NaNoWriMo and trying to find work, my life has been pretty crazy. Secondly, I just didn’t know what to write about.
Fortunately, my students have come to my rescue once again.

A couple of years back, I taught for a science enrichment program’s summer camp. We had kids that ranged in age from kindergarten to sixth grade (and amazingly, not a single one of my fifth or sixth graders was taller than me during any session).

The program’s mascot was a blue gecko. A six-foot-tall blue gecko.

One day, I was explaining the mascot to the kids during a break because one of them asked me about the weird-looking guy on my name tag. A sixth grader toward the back of the group yelled that geckos were stupid. I looked at him, positively scandalized, and said, “Don’t you realize every time you say that, a gecko somewhere falls down dead?” (Can you tell I was a fan of Peter Pan as a child?)

He shouts repeatedly, “Geckos are stupid!” So, I told him he had to save all the geckos he’d just killed by clapping. I’m pretty sure I looked like a complete idiot standing there clapping and telling him to clap if he believed in geckos. He just looked at me with that look they issue every tween for use when the nearest adult is acting silly, and I laughed.

I happened to share this story with three of my students the other night, and they all gave me that look issued to every teen for use when the nearest adult is reminiscing and laughing about it. They all admitted it was fairly funny, but they were all looking at me like I’d gone crazy.

I swear, it’s memories like this that keep me teaching. I get to help kids understand all sorts of things, and I can make a big fool of myself in the process. (And somehow, I do it more often than not without losing the respect of my students.)