Out of My Element

I taught some of my students the "awkward turtle" today.  I felt, after three days, it was time.
It has nothing to do with science and everything to do with me surviving a year teaching the younger end of middle school.

For the uninitiated, you put both of your hands out in front of you, one in front of the other, fingers together, thumbs outstretched to the sides and wriggling.  (Some prefer their "turtles" upside down.  Others like turkeys, but now we're getting ahead of ourselves.)

I did this after a 7th grade girl, looking for a way to convey "things in general" used the portuguese word bainha.  In Spanish this slang would be translated as vaina and is pronounced "vye-nah."  The portuguese pronunciation keeps the starting v sound, but adds a syllable, then simaltaneously emphasizes and changes the i into a long e.  Let's just say that I wasn't the only one in class who thought this 13-year-old was suddenly speaking of female genitalia.

Enter the awkward turtle.  I'm going to need it.

6th and 7th grade has to be the strangest time of life.  "Hormones with legs," an ex-colleague of mine once said.  "Fly them all to the moon and bring them back when they hit high school" was the way my mother put it.  Both are accurate.

Somehow this school year I've got to teach them the generals of the life sciences.  Appropriately enough I have to introduce chemistry; I've already got a giant periodic table hanging in the front of the classroom.  I'm going to need to review a bit, but even I know that hormones are far to complex to appear anywhere on there.

(There are also the two health classes but I'm going to pretend they don't exist at the moment.  I may lay awake all night if I think about those too much.)

Nevertheless, overall it has been a good first week.  While my career up to this point has been breaking ninth graders of middle school habits, I see some bright spots ahead:

• Sixth graders ask an impossible number of questions - no, it doesn't matter if you buy the 100 page versus the 120 page notebook - but they are still enthusiastic about participating and I have never had this many hands raised at one time before, even if I had been asking something painfully obvious like "who has a head?"
• Seventh graders are weird.  They look weird.  They act weird.  They laugh at weird things.  They have no idea why they are laughing at those weird things yet know on some level their laugh has to be more over-the-top than the person who laughed before them, even though they both seem to be aware that both laughs are contrived and yet they don't know why or how to stop.  At the very least, my dumbest jokes are hysterical.
• Both groups are still terrified of the beast known as "tardy."  Yesterday I had nearly the entirety of my first period class in their seats...with fifteen minutes yet for the bell would ring.  This is in direct opposition to the seniors whose lockers are located outside my classroom.  The visual juxtaposition of the seasoned veterans cooly strolling from here to there, internalized clocks set to arrive at their destination just as the bell chimes, with the scurrying rookies, overloaded with giant backpacks, papers haphazardly flying away, weaving in and out of the upper-classmen as if they were mere traffic cones in an obstacle course, kills me on a daily basis.

Regardless, pending all day with this age group is surreal; it's both familiar and foreign.  Like going to your regular grocery store at two o'clock in the afternoon on a random Tuesday.  It's the same store, just that now it is also doubling as some sort of senior citizen social club and there are significantly more stockers and less cashiers.  And is it brighter too?  It seems brighter.

I was more nervous beginning this school year than I was my first year teaching.  Or student teaching, actually.  My principal came into my room within the first five minutes of the first period on the first day.  And then he sat down and watched.  The worst.  

But I'll survive.  I've got my awkward turtle.