Survival Is...

No, this is not a pitch for a posthumous Charles Schulz collection, but rather a sentence frame that I presented to fourth graders on the advent of their beginning a new unit in Language Arts. As is customary, my inquiry was met with blank stares. Then, by means of randomly calling on students based on the stick that I happened to pull from the magic cup, I started to get some forced answers: "It means surviving?" "You have to stay alive?"
Okay. Let's start with that: Staying alive. "Right now, I'm alive. Am I surviving?" I pulled another stick, "Debra?"
Debra stared back at me. I was ready with another popsicle stick, then she spoke up. "Yeah."
"Okay then. I'm surviving. How about," looking down at the little number on the yellow stick, "Jesse?"
"Walking Dead is surviving."
I shook off my initial impulse to lecture on the appropriateness of what pre-teens should be watching on Sunday nights. The floodgates were open. Hands were raised. Side discussions took place. Suddenly everyone had something to say. Everyone was an expert on surviving the zombie apocalypse.
And so that's where I live now. When I was in fourth grade, I worried about intercontinental ballistic missiles and mutually assured destruction. These kids were completely invested in figuring out how they could live while undead monsters roamed the earth with every intent of biting them in order to feast on their warm flesh. Having a "great big knife" to cut off any part of their body that might somehow have become infected was seen as a need. I offered up that they could call it a "machete." The vocabulary is always important.
On and on we went, and while many of them made the more logical leap to surviving a more natural and local disaster like an earthquake or fire, and some were content to refine their topic to a more relaxed "getting lost in the woods," the zombies remained the hot ticket.
If it helps to think of the world as a post-apocalyptic wasteland in order for kids to participate, I will survive. And from the sounds of it, so will they.