One of my usual May posts is the Q & A post, during which I answer whatever questions people ask me. It’s still coming, in two weeks actually, and I’m really hoping I’ll get a long, challenging, and varied list this year.
Answering questions can be a solid writing prompt. One of the things I’ve been doing in class to help my students get used to the idea of constructing paragraphs with main ideas and supporting details is assigning them prompts from something called “The Kids’ Book of Questions.” It contains 268 questions, some silly and light, some heavy and dark, that would be good conversation starters and are mostly age appropriate for elementary students. Some might be a little intense to use as for daily writing warm ups, but there are many, many others to choose from.
Today, with the help of another teacher, I settled on five questions from the book to answer in tonight’s post. We selected them through different methods of mostly random selection. It wasn’t as easy as I thought it would be since it is a book for kids and many of the questions, or aspects of them, aren’t very adaptable to adults. But we settled on five. Here they are, along with my responses.
Question #12: “When you find yourself sitting in front of awful-tasting food that you’re supposed to eat, what’s your best trick for getting rid of it without getting caught?”
I don’t really have this problem, to be honest. I’m kind of picky about food, but for me it’s more about texture being off-putting rather than taste. However, I had several reliable strategies for doing this exact thing when I was a child. I won’t get into details because I don’t think the world needs a full appreciation of how disgusting I was (and Jenny, I promise I will delete any comments you make that clarify this), but I can share what was my best answer for this question. After trying many different things with varying degrees of success with the whole “not getting caught” part, I realized if I filled my mouth at the dinner table with the food I didn’t want right as I finished the meal, I could make a quick dash to the bathroom, spit it all out into the toilet, and BOOM. No evidence.
Question #151: “If you knew that by cheating you could win an important competition for your school and be a hero, would you? Pretend you were sure you wouldn’t get caught.”
It's kind of a funny twist that it's a question for kids and yet I still have a school I can claim as my own. I also just realized this book might have a preoccupation with kids trying not to get caught doing things they shouldn’t. Anyway, no, I wouldn’t. I might be tempted to look for some kind of an advantage or a way to improve my chances, but if I knew I’d won because I’d cheated, I would carry too much guilt and regret for knowing what I had done.
Question #202: “If a friend gave you a gift you didn’t like, would you pretend you liked it?”
As I understand things, I’m particularly difficult to buy gifts for, so I apologize to anyone who ever has to do that. I have gotten some gifts in the past that I wasn’t exactly thrilled with, but I always at least try to act like I liked them. Unfortunately, I don’t know how convincing I ever am.
Question #244: “What do you parents do the most that embarrasses you?”
At this point, I don’t think anything. Back when I was a kid though, one thing that comes to mind was when my dad sat with the family in church, which he didn’t always do because he was a member of the choir for most of my childhood, and sometimes he would still sing the songs with a choral-appropriate amount of projection in his voice. As one of my sisters and I would say, “You can take Dad out of the choir, but you can’t take the choir out of Dad.” I also remember my mother had this t-shirt that said “Candy Cruisin’” on it. It was some promotional swag Dad got at the drugstore he managed from a candy company like Sweet Tarts or Skittles or whatever. The thing was, Mom chose ignore the self-awareness it would take to not wear this shirt in public! Like, at stores! Where people could see it and see she was wearing it! Luckily it quickly rotated its way into her gardening attire.
Question #126: “If you could do one thing you’re not allowed to do yet because you’re supposedly too young, what would it be?”
Retire.
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