Curious

I now teach an advanced group of 8 year olds in the afternoon (your old everyday UPenn class, Matt). That class now has four different teachers in the afternoon and I've been picked to teach them advanced vocabulary 3 times a month. I've never taught them before, but as soon as I walked into the class, everyone screamed out my name as if I've been teaching them for months. I'm not quite sure how they know me. A couple of them have brothers or sisters in the morning kindergarten classes, but other than that... I don't know.

These kids talk like there's no tomorrow. Constantly vying for my attention; telling me stories about kids at school who have kissed each other, or who likes who in what class. They love that my name is Mary - and how it's like 'marry' or 'marriage'. They all keep asking who I'm going to marry. 'Am I going to marry Craig teacher? - If not Craig teacher, am I going to marry Matthew teacher? - If not Matthew teacher, am I going to marry Dave teacher?.....' I just pretend I don't know what they're talking about. I don't like to give them anymore ammo than they already think they have.

I tried to carry on with the lesson. I had to teach them about 30 new vocabulary words. So I would say the word and ask them to come up with sentences using those words. Imagine turned into "Mary imagines marrying Craig". An example of description was "Mary is wearing a white dress and Craig is wearing a black suit at their wedding". My favourite came from Basil. No kidding, when I asked to explain curious, Basil came up with "I'm curious about Mary's love life". I can't believe an 8 year old even knew what that was - Matt, what did you teach them? Or should I blame this on Dave? Either way - this class is obsessed with love, kissing, and marriage. Was I like this at 8 years old?

To top it all off, I looked at next week's vocabulary list - and, ironically, all the words pertain to marriage.....