fatalcookies:

fatalcookies:

fatalcookies:

A non-exhaustive list of things first and second graders have done in my classes:

• broken a glowstick over their hand and become immediately convinced that the fluid on their hand was going to kill them
• proceed to come to me for the rest of the day, after the offending hand was washed and no damage found, and ask if they could do x activity with the not-really-injured hand
• fallen out of a tree
• kicked each other in the ribs while cartwheeling
• informed me I looked like a monster when I wore black eyeliner instead of brown
• wrote a rhyming ditty about me in which I got hit by a car
• illustrated me before and after the aforementioned fictional car accident (smiling on the left, x’s over my eyes to the right)
• cried hysterically for ten minutes upon not receiving the prompt card labeled “cat”
• coined the phrase “so-and-so is feeling like the snail today,” to indicate when a peer is feeling overwhelmed and momentarily antisocial
• inquired, in a very skeptical tone, if I was always smiling and always this happy
• exclaimed that I am “really pretty!” under my uniform smock
• collectively decided that I am the ideal human coat hanger, both in the sense that I myself am human, and as well as in the sense that tiny humans are the ones that hang themselves off of me

• angry!cried for fifteen minutes straight upon hearing that “ballet” had a t in it
• touched my waist when I showed her what I was wearing under my smock, and said, “wow, you aren’t fat at all.”
• pointed at the cover of my Greek Mythology book, at one of the shirtless and ripped men, and asked me very skeptically if that was what Hades looked like.

Easter Camp edition!–expanding out to some older and younger kids, hot topic being Ancient Greek mythology:

• asked me, for almost two hours straight, to “tell another story!” about Ancient Greek mythology, thus coming to hear about 90% of my knowledge of the Greek mythos (and unknowingly engaging in the several-thousand-year-old oral tradition)
• asked me skeptically why the gods invented man, but not woman until much later (I told them that the gods have no imagination)
• carried out a discussion, wrt Chronos, as to why eating your own children is bad
• decided to act out the Pandora myth, namely performing Pandora opening the box, and all the little miseries that fly out of the box
• proceeded to characterize the little miseries, e.g. “I’m the old-age monster. I’ve got saggy flappy muscles and lots of wrinkles!”
• upon telling the version of the myth in which Pandora is heroic, for having closed the box on the last and worst misery, Foresight, thus saving humanity from knowing every bad thing that would ever happen to them, and thus becoming hopeless: one little girl insisted that this was actually awful, because “if we knew every bad thing that would happen to us, then we could just give up!”
• consequently, all interested got to sit through a brief explanation of nihilism