Think that Andy’s class is the only one worth a blog post? Dead wrong! Ok, it’s true that Andy’s students can express themselves at a level beyond mine. He gets lots more students cursing in new and inventive ways, whereas my kids’ most complex sentence so far was “Miss Kitty, are you fat?” Even though my students’ English is much worse, their minds are still pretty interesting.
I was teaching my second graders about jobs recently, and we were all pretty sick of trying to drill the words “factory worker” into their heads. I tried to mix it up a little bit, and I told them to draw a picture of what they wanted to be when they grew up, then write a sentence explaining why they wanted that job. Most kids wrote that they wanted to be an English teacher because they like English (aw!), or that they wanted to be a clerk because their parents were clerks (hm…), but this student, named Lemon, had the only picture worth collecting:
Plenty of the pictures were slightly violent, but this one was the most complex. At first I thought he wanted to be a US army soldier, but he pointed out that the cannon next to the tank was Chinese. Only then did I notice the Japanese bomber! Here’s the future according to Lemon the second-grader: him and the US joining up to smash Japan! I was mostly relieved that he didn’t envision China bombing America, or vice versa, so I gave him a high-five and moved on.
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