The 2017 Round-Up of 4th and 5th Grade Zen

Either the kids weren't as funny this year, or I was going through some stuff, or perhaps both. Whatever the reason, there weren't as many Zen moments this school year. But that doesn't mean the ones we had still weren't gems:

This exchange....

"Do cowboys ride camels too?"

"No. Because then they'd be called camelboys." 

"Camels have genders?"

"Um, yeah. There are boy camels and girl camels. Where do you think baby camels come from?"
"Wait: Does that mean cowboys ride cows?”

"Friday is for ALL the dances.”

A girl tries to flip her pencil in the air. She misses and it ends up on the floor.

A boy on the other side of the room notices and says, "You'd better practice some more if you want to be ready for that talent show.”

This exchange, between two students:

"Last year I went to a French immersion school."

"You went to a French Martian school?!”

In science I held up a graduated cylinder with a plastic base attached. I asked the kids why it was called a graduated cylinder. One boy raises his hand and says, with complete sincerity, "Because if you flip the cylinder part over, that black thing looks like one of those graduation hats.”

The room fills with screams when someone spots a spider walking across a desk. After one girl brings it out to the hallway, a boy comes up and tells me, "I had a spider stuck in my ear when I was three, Mr. Mulroy. So I'm used to them.”

We were taking surveys in class today for data collection. One girl walked around asking people this question: "Which is your favorite kind of cake: Twinkies, Cupcakes, Sno-balls, or Hobos?”

"I have a headache from writing so many numbers. Either that or it's a sinus infection.”

"Mr. Mulroy, if what we learned about the water cycle is true, then one of the snowflakes that landed on my face this morning could have been used a long time ago to wash Abraham Lincoln's shirt.”

Boy, pointing to a problem in his math journal: "These are mixed numbers."

Me: "I know."

Boy: "But they're already in simplest form."

Me: "I know. The directions say to write them as fractions."


Boy: "Oh! So we're supposed to do what it says?”

I see a kid walking back from lunch, busily licking a finger.

"What are you doing?" I ask. 

"Licking the cheese dust left from my chips off my finger. This one has a lot on it."

The kid pulls the finger out and looks at it.

"Oh," she says, mildly surprised. "I guess that's a Band-Aid.”

The sound system in my classroom comes with a hand held microphone. Sometimes I'll use it to be heard over the noise level. Sometimes I'll hold it for a student so they can be heard more clearly. Sometimes I'll randomly hold it in front of a student just to see how they'll respond. Most of the time they'll just have a mildly stunned look and say "Hello."

Today I caught one girl off guard with the microphone. She smiled and said "Hello." I immediately shifted it to the boy sitting next to her -- one of the three funniest students I've ever had -- and without missing a beat, this boy leaned into the microphone and sang, "It's me.”

A girl walks in the room early in the morning and says, "I just saw a fifteen-legged spider crawling on my bedroom wall!"

One boy's response: "That wasn't a spider. Spiders only have eight legs. That was probably a monster.”

Student #1: "I'm gonna die! I'm gonna die of dehydration!"

Student #2: "So drink water."

Student #1: "That's too much work.”

The kids were working on rate problems in math. They started with the 365 days in a year.

"How many weeks are in a year?" one girl asked.

"Fifty-two," I answered. She started doing some quick division to check that, so I quickly added, "If you're being exact about it, it's fifty-two weeks and one day."

She finished her work and looked up at me. "There's an extra day?" she asked. "What day is that?"
Without missing a beat, the boy sitting next to her looked up and answered, "Wednesday."

And finally, this photo, taken during the final week of the school year. I think it sums up what goes on in that week almost too perfectly: 

The Pros and Cons of Goal Setting

Two years ago a friend posted a photo online at the beginning of summer break that caught my eye. She and her family had made a giant poster filled with the fun things they wanted to do that summer. I borrowed the idea and gave it a little tweak, instead making my list out of Post-It Notes and turning my refrigerator door into one big colorful Summertime To-Do List.

It turned out pretty well. I didn’t complete every note, but I got to most of them. The whole thing added some welcomed structure to my summer, not to mention it really felt satisfying to peel off those notes when I was finished with them. I liked the idea well enough that I did it again last year, to about the same degree of success. 

Summer break for 2017 starts in just a few more days, and I’m not sure whether or not I want to cover the fridge in Post-Its again. I'm definitely a list guy, and this can be a great way to push myself into doing things I normally might not do if there weren’t goals attached. Making a list can motivate you to try new things, explore interesting places, and give yourself some experiences and adventures that you otherwise might not have. It’s also a great way to keep track of books to read, movies to see, or shows to binge. A list like this can help make sure time doesn’t slip by without having some fun, and can help provide the summer with a narrative.

My one mistake was making a list had actual To-Do list tasks mixed in with the summertime fun goals. A lot of these tasks are things I mean to get done during the summer because I’ve nearly procrastinated them into oblivion during the rest of the year. The problem is I’ll continue to procrastinate since I know I have the whole summer to get them done. Giving yourself things to do seems easy at the beginning of the summer when there’s all the time in the world ahead of you. The notes with those unpleasant chores and boring appointments have always been some of the last ones I've accomplished, if they even get addressed at all. By late August they end up staring at me from a mostly empty refrigerator door, almost taking on an attitude because they’ve gone ignored for so long.

Goal setting can be a good way to get things done, but it can also be defeating if it isn’t managed carefully. When you set goals, you need to consider how much motivation you’ll bring to your attempt. How badly do you really want to accomplish these things? Are those goals making it onto the list because you know you should really get them done, or because you genuinely want to achieve them? How many things on the list are Want-To instead of Have-To?

I know I’ll have to get some of those stupid chores taken care of this summer. I also know there will be some I continue to ignore, as long as they aren’t demanding me to deal with them. That leaves me with wondering whether or not to include them, if I make a list. 

Which begs the question: Should I even make a list? Should I take advantage of this newly-discovered and hard fought wave of optimism I’m riding after such a long and personally dark winter and wait for the discoveries and adventures present themselves? Or would it be better to give myself the challenges of taking steps outside of my comfort zone?

What’s better — to intentionally aim for the things I might not otherwise consider, or to use this my time off to let things spontaneously evolve as they will? 

I have exactly three days to make up my mind.

Album of the Week: Celebration Rock

I haven’t known a life without summer vacation since 1973. After having been a regular part of life for so long, my summers have a feel: Freedom, openness. An absence of structure, an abundance of possibility. 

Summer starts incrementally for me: Memorial Day weekend is the unofficial beginning, since it has the first day off I’ve had in about two months. June first is when the weather nerds on TV banter about Meteorological Summer to remind everyone they’ve received an education and can do more than dress up and smile. For my corner of the world, the first Friday in June ushers in another level summer when we have Track and Field Day at school, signaling to everyone that the academic year is almost over. Next Thursday will be the last day of school for the kids, then Friday is the last for the teachers. After that summer has basically arrived. Because seriously, other than the people in charge of setting text in the calendar factory, who considers June 20 to be part of spring?

With all the time and opportunity and warm weather, summer quickly becomes a season filled with celebrations, planned and spontaneous, genuine and accidental. One of the albums that has become a standard summertime soundtrack for me is the appropriately named “Celebration Rock” by the Canadian duo Japandroids. The band released a new album this past winter, “Near to the Wild Heart of Life.” It’s more mature and subdued, and probably my favorite album of 2017 so far. I’ve had more time to spend with “Celebration Rock” though, so it would probably get my nod as the favored of the two.

The album consists of fast, loud, pounding anthems ideal for the summer, and perfect for summer driving. Every song sounds almost exactly the same, which is usually a negative, but in this case makes the songs seem more like separate movements in one thematic piece of music. They're all centered around barely contained chaos, noise, and energy. Lyrics like “We yell like hell to the heavens” are less about being statements of rebellion as they are of ferocious joy. Some of the song titles make strong enough declarations of this on their own: “Fire’s Highway;” “Adrenaline Nightshift;” “Continuous Thunder. The guitars and the drums throughout the album seem to be in competition to be louder and faster than each other without losing control, while the backing vocal harmonies sound like a garage full of friends trying to annoy the neighbors late at night on a summer weekend.

The first and the last sounds you hear on the album are the popping explosions of distant fireworks. My house is circled by four different Minneapolis suburbs, none of which is more than three miles away from me. Because of this, I hear fireworks going off almost weekly from some summertime festival or celebration. More often than not I can follow the sound if I step outside at night, and even see quick flashes of color erupting just above the distant horizon. With my last benchmark of summer only days away, I’m looking forward to getting back to those nights and those celebrations, and having this album playing in the car for some of those long summer drives.