Is My Grandma Mud?

Every day, I try to remember that my students’ minds are like soft lumps of clay. Malleable. Impressionable. They can be formed into the most heinous piece of garbage or an artistic masterpiece that delights the senses of its observers.

Every day, my students remind me in which direction I am forming their minds. Most of the time, I am pleased with the outcomes... and it’s not just because I’ve caught them apologizing to anchovies before eating them.

The following are excerpts from my daily interactions with little people:

We had been studying our Oceans unit for approximately two weeks when I decided I had to explain certain cruel realities. One truth I shared with my class was how manatees are endangered due to human exploits- specifically, that they are recurrent victims of boat propellers. As in they get sliced up. Badly. Sometimes they die. Yep.

Now, I obviously wanted some sort of tree-hugging-hippie reaction, and I was slightly disappointed when we simply moved on to the next tale of terror. However, I soon realized all was not lost. The next week I took my students to the local aquarium so they could get up close and personal with their beloved hammerhead sharks and jellyfish. Well, after seeing thirty-seven types of fish we hadn’t studied, we finally got to the manatee tank.

Beloved Student: “Franzi-Teacher is this the one who dies by propeller?”

Franzi-Teacher: “Yep. Look at all its cuts. Pretty sad, huh?”

Beloved Student: “Poor manatee…”

Now, I thought that was the end of it. I had forged some sort of temporary empathy in a little boy. I figured that was all my little horror story was worthy of. Wrong. The very next day, the Beloved Student had to do a presentation on an ocean animal. Several students had gone before him with beautifully decorated posters which had been the handiwork of mothers… and Wikipedia. Then the Beloved Student got up and proudly displayed his poster. We all took it in: On a yellowed piece of paper, he had drawn three tiny sketches of his dear manatees. In a jagged scrawl, he had written everything he knew:

-They are huge and big.

-They live in ocean.

-They eat the cabbage. (only in aquariums, but hey, the kid’s observant)

and…

-They died by propeller.

Some of the kids giggled and questioned why his poster looked so homely. In my best teacher voice I took his defense: “This… is exactly what I wanted. [Beloved Student], you did such a great job!” My class now understands that I don’t deal well with Mamas-R-Us posters. Keep it real. Keep it personal. Keep it simple.

See, the best conversations can sprout from the personal, the simple, and the real:

Personal: I asked how they think salt got in the ocean.

-“Bad man put salt in the ocean.”

-“Rain came down and an octopus did it.” 

Come again?

Simple: I had been teaching my students that certain sea creatures were invertebrates. However, it was evident to me that some of the vocabulary was just beyond their reach: “What’s an en-vel-ta … ?”

“An invertebrate is an animal with no backbone.”

Blank stares filled the room while some feeble attempts were made at mimicking me. I then repeated the word, this time inadvertently wiggling my spine to the syllables: “In-ver-te-brate!”

With their backs arching to and fro like trees in a typhoon, they all shouted back, “In-ver-te-brate!”

And it was that easy. What’s a little seat wiggling when they get the answer right?

Real: Hagfish. Repulsive old farts that eat their prey from the inside out. However, somehow I was ill-prepared for a hag-related question when it came up during lunchtime:

"How do hagfish get inside the fish?”

My eyes widened a little as I looked at the student who had posed the question, “Ummm, through holes in its body.”

I was mistaken in thinking that would be the end of it.

“What is that?”

Was this kid really going to make me say it? “Ummmm. Like… its mouth…”  

“And?”

“And… its… .” I pointed to my butt.

“What?”

Insert me pointing to my butt again and making a purposefully awkward/pained face.

“Oooooh.”

Sometimes our lunch conversations are reminiscent of past family dinners when my father decided to describe in vivid detail a calf’s pea-green diarrhea. Yum.

And then there was the death talk. For the first time, I experienced the enormous burden of explaining life and death to a group of mega-minors. Pre-minors. Mini-people who you would not suspect of caring too much about the afterlife. Well, they do, folks.

Unbelievably, this death talk started off as an innocent discussion on the five layers of the ocean. See, the Abyssal Zone happens to have a profound layer of mud, constantly deepened by the decaying bones of marine animals. When hands started flying up, I further explained the breakdown of bones and how all animals are composed of the same material as the earth. Therefore, upon death, living things become dirt again. Hands lowered hesitantly, until one girl fearfully asked: “Is my grandma… mud?”

And so it began.

First I had the child clarify whether her grandmother was currently in a state wherein she could even become mud. I then clarified that mud was a combination of water and dirt, and that since people weren’t buried in the ocean (typically), her grandmother was more likely dirt than mud. The more I rambled the more I felt like I was in some sort of scientific nightmare. Thankfully, one of the students helped free me of my longwinded logical jargon: “I think we go up to the sky when we die.” I gratefully opened the spiritual door and explained that many people think that the soul inside a person’s body goes to Heaven when they die. The tension that had built up throughout the discussion slowly dissipated. “But”, I stated clearly, “our bodies still turn into dirt.”

Earth to earth, ashes to ashes, dust to dust.