Underwear and experimenting with a new word!

It’s been awhile since I’ve updated this blog. There is quite a bit going on right now: 1) I am still managing some health issues. I know I’ve said this before, but we’re on the upswing (at least I just keep telling myself that). 2) There is no heat in my regular classroom. We had to move into another classroom. Not only did we displace someone else, but we also don’t have a lot of our usual stuff. I have one more week in this other room, and then, after winter break, I may be back in my classroom. This really shakes things up for kids. With that said, my class of angels are doing really well with it.

Here are two highlights:

We are reading this mystery book in one of our book groups, and in this story, a boy is searching for something in his grandma’s room. By accident, the character in this book opens a drawer that turns out to his grandma’s underwear drawer. Most of the kids giggle and laugh. This one boy stops me and says:

Boy: wait, I’m confused. Why is there an underwear drawer in his grandma’s room?
Me: Sweetheart, he’s in her bedroom.
Boy: grandparents wear underwear...wow..I never really thought about that before! I guess they do...
Me: of course, they do! They’re people too.
Boy: weird

This other story I heard in a the teacher’s lunchroom today, and I was really laughing at this one. A teacher shares that one of her students, who is kind of into eccentric and reads a lot, discovers a now inappropriate, esoteric n-word to describe a black person. It was a a black girl’s birthday on this particular day, and the boy decided to wish her “Happy Birthday, n...” He did not mean it in a derogatory way. The adults really believe he learned it in a book and didn’t understand the other implications of the word. I guess that’s what a second grader can do when he’s exposed to adult words without knowing the adult consequences...kind of sad but funny too.