Food For Thought: Brains!

One of the things I learned pretty late in the teaching game was this: Kids are weird. Just when you think you've got things figured out, they turn around and prove that, once again, you have failed to understand their motivations. I would imagine, as a practicing adult, that children who wanted to go to lunch would understand that the simple requirement of a quiet line would be a simple enough expectation to meet in order to achieve the stated goal. Not so. Instead, there are plenty of classrooms full of ravenous pre-teens who seem completely content to poke and prod one another, sing and hum, dance and wiggle, all while the clock continues to creep forward into the sacred time of lunch recess.
I learned a while back that all those rhetorical questions mean absolutely nothing to the minds of an elementary school student. "Why can't you stand still?" "Do you want to stand here all day?" "Do you want to miss lunch completely?" The answers are, "I dunno," "Sure, why not?" and "No." Not that anyone of them would bother answering any of them since, after all, they are rhetorical.
Which leads me to PE last week. I ruminated long and hard, and my wife helped me find a special game to play in anticipation of Halloween: Zombie Tag. It was hip, it was happening, and it was so simple, even a child could play it. For those of you who have never played Zombie Tag, it can best be described as a dry land version of Marco Polo. When the blindfolded zombie growls, the fleeing humans have to growl back, giving the zombie some idea of where the fresh brains are located. All the kids I taught grasped this portion of the game immediately. There was plenty of snarling and even a little moaning. The problem was, there was no sense of danger. Rather than being terrified at the notion of being touched by a member of the undead, these kids seemed intent on putting themselves directly in the clutches of the zombie. To be fair, it wasn't every child, but enough that it made each game last only a few seconds. Most of them seemed to be intent on becoming "it." They felt no stigma at becoming a member of the walking dead. Perhaps this means that our children have become even more accepting of all living creatures, and those not so much.
Or maybe kids are just weird.