Some days I'm totally bewildered by the complete difference in volume that children deliver. In any given classroom of mine it's nearly evenly divided between the extremely loud or the surprisingly quiet. And there really isn't any middle ground with this; every kid is either an explosion of noise ready to go off at any moment like a roman candle, or their lips are sealed.
I've seen kids so quiet and shy, they hardly seem to be pushing air from their lungs during speech. I'm constantly straining to catch their words and telling them to speak up. So it doesn't help when the other half of the class are shouting like nuts.
Which brings me to the other thing. Every class also seems divided on students who have energy and those who have none. Some kids cling to me like burrs and have the attention spans of hummingbirds. The rest just plop down in their chairs and gaze about with sleepy expressions.
I guess it's stupid for me to find it odd that children are not all the same, but sometimes I wonder how it can be so split down the middle. I come into class and half of the kids act like I'm the coolest thing since candy, and the others stare me down with such apathy it's astounding. Looking at me like I'm trying to convince them to trade their cellphones for a rusted baby carriage filled with dead shrimp.
Last week in a class of four we did a writing exercise about our ideal pet. Two students wrote near identical paragraphs about cute kittens. The other two wrote about dragons they could ride around on; dragons that eat people. Also, one girl named her dragon 'gaeto', which I found out in Korean means 'dog vomit'.
It seems that even their ideas are loud and quiet.
1 comment:
That last paragraph was brilliant. And earlier you said nuts...hehe
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