Part II

All that sappy stuff I said yesterday about the teachable moments? And the children teaching me life lessons?

Yeah, I take that back.

Not entirely, but today was pretty bad. I think I might need get some kind of mister that sprays out a mild sedative every 30 minutes or something. My kids this year... are CRAZY. Or "busy." Or "active." Whatever you want to call it, they are all over the place. Need constant movement. And today, the only thing they were teaching me was how to lose my patience. One of them was acting crazy enough to prompt another student to call out, "I think he needs Ritalin!" Probably so.

*By the way, how do you know what Ritalin is?*

The nice thing about this year is my ability to forget about the day's events and chalk it up to them being juice box hungover from the Super Bowl. Tomorrow's another day, or something like that, and no matter how bad things get in my room one day, they could be perfect the next. Plus tomorrow's the hundredth day of school, which is always a pretty cute time. By always I mean it was last year.

What was supposed to be Part Deux of this blog post was the difference in teaching children something and teaching adults something. And that the older you get, the harder it is to teach people.

Why? Because kids have faith. Adults have less. Right now, my faith is pretty low. I'm hoping that will change tomorrow.

Pretty much all you have to do to teach a kid is to show them something that doesn't fit into their schema.  Show it to them, and they adjust what they think to include that event, even if what they see might be wrong. To them, there is no trickery. There's very little skepticism. Whatever they see is truth. If they don't see it... then, it's not true. Duh.

Adults are not that way. You could show them something a million times and they might still lean back and shake their heads. They might come up with a million excuses, a million reasons to counter what they've seen. Adults are (generally) very protective of where they place their faith, if they place it anywhere at all.

That's why in some ways, I'd rather have the kids. That look in their eyes when their skepticism melts away is something that you rarely see in people over the age of 12. It's something really special.

The only problem is that in the precious seconds after you've gained that trust and faith, they start sliding Bruce Springsteen Super Bowl show style underneath tables. Does it still count when they do that?