I talked to the fourth graders yesterday–something I’ve done from time to time over the years.
“This is Mr. Hasan,” Eric said to his students. “His son was in my class. In fact I am responsible for him breaking his arm when he fell on the soccer field.”
Eric illuminated Ben’s life years ago. He pumped energy and excitement into those kids. And he’s still at it. I saw it twelve years ago. I’ve seen it for the past several years. I saw it again yesterday.
You walk into his class, and it seems, it looks, it sounds like chaos. You can’t hear yourself think. It’s loud. You can’t stand still. It’s hectic. But look carefully and you see kids collaborating on a story and figuring out a puzzle and taking photographs and drawing diagrams and organizing stuff and messing stuff up. There’s excitement everywhere. They’re taking things out. They’re putting things away. They’re milling around with great urgency. Holding pencils and books. Shuffling sheets of paper. Writing things down. Looking things up. Asking questions. Devising explanations.
This is what I walked into just before noon, having come to talk about the Sun, the Earth and the Moon. Except as it turned out, I didn’t get very far.
I never got to origins. I never got to how the moon and sun move in the sky. I never got to proto-planets and proto-suns. There were too many questions. There were too many opinions. Too much excitement. Too much amazement. But we did talk about knowing where the sun is by looking at the crescent on a planet’s moon. We did talk about geosynchronous satellites. We did talk about the North Star. And the Northern Lights. And the aurorae on Neptune. We talked about Andromeda and the Milky way. And the Local Group. And the Virgo Supercluster. And we talked about how it’s all moving and turning and orbiting and transiting and shining. And we talked about how it’s all so very, very cool.
We talked about all that. Not so much Earth/Moon/Sun as it turned out, but I think they liked it.
There was the boy with black hair in the black shirt who kept raising his hand and looking straight at me but said he was only stretching. There was the girl who kept scooting up behind me in the front of the room so she could be close to the action. There were the boys reclining on the carpet with hands behind their heads asking questions about the photographs. There was the smiling boy who introduced himself during a break, because we have the same name. There were the two kids who high-fived me as they filed off to recess. And there was the girl in pink.
She sat in front with her hand up most of the time. I called on her often. And her questions and comments were sharp. “Good point,” I would say and talk a bit about her observation. “Good question, we don’t know for sure.” Or, “I don’t know, but you could research that.” I couldn’t have planted anyone better.
“Did you see the girl in the front?” Eric asked.
“The girl in pink?”
“Yes. Did you notice how much she talked, how many questions she asked? She never does that. She’s normally quiet and sits in the back. It’s not like her to speak up.”
That classroom of his. It’s a veritable bubbling cauldron, and everyone’s in the stew.