Monday, March 21, 2011

Kickin' It

Stumbling into class on Monday, the 4th graders are usually pretty zonked from an intense weekend indoors filled with video games, cartoons, Hot Cheetos, and Coke. Due to their zombified nature, I try to get their brains unclogged with a weekend roundup of the class. Many of the students will still be half asleep as a girl lists the various activities (Truth or Dare, Youtubing Justin Bieber, Playing Guess Who?) she and her friends participated in on their Friday night sleepover, but today the author of "The Women that Drank Gasoline" got the attention of the entire class with his weekend rundown:

Boy: We had a soccer tournament in Stockton this weekend.
Me: Oh yeah? How'd you guys do?
Boy (In a quiet and hesitant voice): We kicked...butt.
I could barely hear him so I asked him to repeat what he said, but at that moment, his tangled facial expression showed me that he thought he had said something inappropriate. He scrambled to remedy his comment.
Me: Wait, what did you say?
Boy: We smacked ass?
Me: WHAT!?
Boy: We smacked ass!
Me: Dude, you can't say that.
Boy: Sorry.
The class giggled inquisitively, wondering why their classmate had chosen such bizarre verbage. I don't know where in his young mind he believed that "smacked ass" was a more acceptable response than "kicked butt", but at least he was generating synonyms...we've been working on that all year.

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