Adventures in Wonderland

I'm a people watcher.

I inherited this observational from my mother, who is also an avid people watcher. Any time the two of us are together, our eyes are peeled and ears pricked to anything fascinating or unusual that might happen in our vicinity. The best times are when we casually turn to each other, make eye contact, and know without a word which human subject has caught the other's attention and why. Maybe it was their glaring body art or their blatant campaign to be on some magazine's Fashion Police section, but we always know.

I love subbing for this very reason. It's like working in a zoo. Seriously. Think back to the movie Mean Girls, where Lindsay Lohan's character often imagines her peers turning into wild animals... High school and junior high: just like that. It is prime people watching material.

The best part about this little universe, and I was absolutely 100% guilty of this, is their complete obliviousness to life outside of those public school walls. As a teen, I got the "Right now, you're a big fish in a little pond... but just wait til you get to college" speech more than once. At the time, I rolled my eyes because it seemed quite certain that college would be just a freer version of high school. Sure, I was wrong. So incredibly wrong. But you wouldn't have been able to convince me otherwise, so I don't try to convince my students now. Instead, I just smile and nod knowingly... They'll learn. One student tried to convince me that her life would end if I didn't let her check out a research book (against school rules) for her research paper. I looked at her thoughtfully for a moment before asking her if she intended on going to college. She said yes, so I took that as a sign to gently clue her in, "Then you need to thank your lucky stars for that research paper. I'd pay money to do THAT research paper instead of my own."

Okay, so sometimes I can't just smile and nod.

At the junior high level, I love how serious everything is. Legends are gospel. I heard a boy last week telling his friend with absolute authority that his grandmother used to work at the high school, and the high school lunchroom served Chick-Fil-A sandwiches and Pizza Hut everyday for lunch, and sometimes Chick-Fil-A chicken biscuits for breakfast. Maybe I shouldn't have, I probably embarrassed him, but I had to correct him. I couldn't let him go on like that only to have his dreams crushed on his first day in the cafeteria at good ol' GHS.

The longer I sub, and the more jobs I get, the more I realize that it is a necessity that I start keeping a record of all the things my students say because Bill Cosby was dead on the money: kids say the darndest things.