Let's Play Goth!

Two really quick stories about my dear little students.

The other day, I was in our classroom with my little 4th grader and I was shuffling through some of their papers, kind of focusing on it intently. She had just got done with lunch and was kind of twirling around the room and singing to herself when all of a sudden she stops and says, "Hey! Let's play 'GOTH'!" I was like, "Hmm?" "Let's play,'Goth!'" she repeats. I was still trying to figure out the paperwork so I just said, "Okay, sounds good," without questioning her on the details. Then, she just jumps up, shuts all the blinds in the room to make it as dark as possible, and just lays down on the floor with her arms crossed over her like a vampire. She's just laying there with her eyes shut pretending to be dead. I was dying. I was like, "That's how you play 'Goth?'" Like, when she thinks of gothic people, that's what she thinks they do. I feel like we're going to have to have a conversation soon about how the people that work at Hot Topic are not bad people, just different.

We took a trip recently to Las Vegas, so my 4th grader could take a state writing test. We were having lunch at Subway during a break in the test and I was taking the moment to you know, set my sandwich down and tell him really seriously that I was so proud of him and I really thought he was going to ace this test because he's such an intuitive writer, "You are doing so great, I just want you to know that I'm proud of all the work you've done and" - "What if you could live in a house made of ham?" This is what he interrupts me to ask. He had been looking over my shoulder at a huge poster of different kinds of ham. I love it. I'm trying to like, have a really serious talk with him and what he's thinking is, "I wanna live in a HAM house!" They are the sweetest kids ever.