My 7th grade students are currently working on "Curiosity Speeches." Based on what I learned at the Literacy Institute this past summer, I wanted to reinvigorate students' curiosities in life. So I'm assigning a speech where they have to ask 5 curiosity questions and they get to research it and give an informational speech about it. My plan is to also later work it into a multigenre presentation to teach visual aids. But I digress...
The other day we were in the computer lab so the students could look up the answers to their curiosities and decide which one to pursue. One boy was looking for the answer to "Why are iPads square?" He was sitting at the computer very close to the desk I was sitting at. I knew he was working on this question, when seemingly out of nowhere, he asks, "Mrs. Kreider, what are Maxi Pads?"
I tried to keep my face composed (and for anyone who knows me well will understand what a struggle that is... I've never been good at hiding my emotions from my face). My brain was quickly rushing to find any kind of reply that would cut off the conversation without having to discuss maxi pads with him.
So to give my brain some more time to process, I asked him, "Where do you see that?" He pointed to some sort of advertisement or something on one of the google sites that pulled up during his research. During that quick little pause of time, the best my brain could come up with was, "Well, it has nothing to do with iPads, so you don't need to worry about it."
THANK GOODNESS the kid dropped it at that point and just went on about his work!! He probably knew what it was all along and just wanted to see me squirm! lol. Ugh, what are we supposed to say to questions like that???? Serves me right for trying to encourage their curiosities! lol
(Story addendum: I thought my story was one of my best examples so far about the awkward things kids say to teachers. That was until I spoke with one of our health teachers today, who told me about his 8th grade lessons on sex ed when a young man asked him about condoms breaking. My heart goes out to the aforementioned teacher, and I am now extremely thankful for questions about maxi pads!)
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