keepin' it real

Every Wednesday and Thursday, instead of having every class for an hour, we have half our classes, and each one lasts for ninety-five minutes. Depending on the class, this is either heaven or hell. There is no middle ground.

Today I had Journalism class, and even though I was wildly busy trying to keep track of what twenty different teens were doing, I really enjoyed it, because they're great kids, smart and funny and full of themselves.

Here's real dialog from today's class:

Teacher: "What are you doing?"
Student: " Keepin' it real! What are YOU doin'?

Teacher: (To a different student) "Why did you suddenly run from the room when we started reading your article out loud?"
Student: ".Uhhhh...(eyes flit side-to-side).....Uh, because I left the oven on?"

Then we decided that the front page should have a group photo of all the boys in the class, to go with an article titled, 'Guys,' so off they went with the digital camera, and instructions to take several photos, so if eyes were closed or expressions were goofy, we could fix them in photoshop.

We downloaded the seven photos and looked them over. It took two or three before they figured out that the really tall guy should probably stand in back. One boy looked totally asleep in all seven shots, which I could comment on here, but I'd better not.

So I was sitting around with several of the kids, looking through the photos, and someone noticed how one of the boys had unconsciously clasped his hands at crotch level, like he was protecting himself. And we all looked, and there was this silence, ...as we all saw at the same time, that EVERY boy was doing some unconscious variation of the same gesture. In every photo.

I can just hear it now: "Hi honey, what did you learn in school today?"