I really love my kids...

...even when they alternately make me giggle maniacally and make me want to cry.

The terribly sad story first: The kids had filled up the "mystery prize" cube jar and got a fun day today-- I give them a snack, and we play games like Apples to Apples and Othello and they get to free explore with the math manipulatives-- things I wish we could do more often but there is always so damn much work to do. Anyway, I didn't feel like making cookies or anything last night, but I had a box of Clementines that I had bought and I figured that with these kids, fruit is such a treat, so I might as well hand them out. The kids loved them and they just beamed-- "oooh, oranges!" They knew exactly what to do with them-- get a piece of paper towel to put the peel on and to catch any juice squirts, and watch out for the seeds, and wash your hands afterwards 'cause they'll be sticky.

Except one of my boys didn't know what to do. He just looked at his Clementine as if I had just handed him a completely foreign object. He held it out to me-- no words, there were no words, but his eyes were huge question marks. I nodded, understanding that he just had no idea what to do. I showed him how to break open the skin and peel it off. Once he had done that, he brought it to me again. "Do I eat the white stuff?" he asked. I explained that it was a matter of preference, and that some people really liked it. He turned the peeled orange about in his hands, and then said, "How do I open it?" He meant how should he place his thumbs to split the fruit into halves and then into sections.

I could understand if maybe this boy was new to this country, or lived in a part of the country where fruit was scarce, but no... this boy is a born-and-bred white-bread American, living well below the poverty line. This is a society where it makes more sense to spend $6 on a week's worth of 99-cent bags of chips than it does to by a box of Clementines. Yes, he has had oranges before, but they've all been served at lunch (free lunch, I might add, which means he comes from a certain financial bracket) where they have already been quartered or peeled for him. He had never had the pleasure-- no, the luxury-- to peel an orange for himself. Just holding the fruit in his hands was strange to him.

If this was a prize for him, something strange and novel, then I must make it more of our classroom routine to have treats such as these. If something as simple as an orange makes more of an impression on a child than any No Child Left Behind implementation, then something in our schools is very, very wrong.

And now, to cheer you up from that insane injustice, I present the silly story: I have another boy who loves his little toys, little gadgets and gizmos, little-boy things, but sometimes they get too disruptive and he'd rather play with them than do his work. The first time I had to take one away he sulked for an hour-- and this is not normally a kiddo who sulks. (Of course I told him he could have it after class-- but he would rather stim with it than focus on me and that's what was making him upset.) Anyway, yesterday it happened again-- he had a little plastic doodad and it kept appearing and work wasn't getting done, and he was getting that I'd-rather-perseverate-on-this-thing-than-do-anything-else look in his eye again, so I took it away and put it on the back table where he could look at it but not play with it. He's one of those kids that I have to play Captain Obvious with because he can't always express his feelings, so when I noticed his work was still not getting done I said, "Wow, I see you have your hands over your ears and your eyes are really wide. That is telling me that you are worried about something and it's not your math."

"But I want my toy back," he sniffled.

I explained again that the work was not getting done, and he could have the toy after class, but now wasn't the time to play with it. He covered up his ears again and stared at the table, wishing hard I would just go away.

I needed a new tactic to get this kiddo out of his funk. I just shook my head and said (completely deadpan), "Well, that leaves me no choice but to torment you with really bad jokes until you smile again."

The kid turned beet red, and I thought oh no, now I've embarrassed him and made everything worse, but his face burst into this huge smile and he just started giggling. Not just giggling-- all out guffawing! His expression was like, "Dear God, no-- not the bad jokes! Anything but those!"

So of course I dipped into my wide repertoire of pirate jokes (Why couldn't the little kid watch the pirate movie? 'Cause it was rated AAARRRRRGGGHHHH!!!) and this kid almost went into convulsions laughing so hard. In a few minutes he wiped the tears from his eyes (so did the rest of the class-- we haven't laughed like that in a long time) and I said, "are you better now?" and he said "yep" and did twenty minutes of solid work, and the toy was no longer an issue.

I guess I need to memorize a bunch of horridly terrible jokes for when this happens again!