On Thursday I spent most of my time trying to encourage the kids to do their work, do it themselves, and do it well. Usually after encouraging them a couple of times they're fine and will do the work so they can go play. But that day we were having a particularly hard time getting them to be motivated to do work. And the sad thing is, I wasn't terribly motivated to do work either, so that made it even more difficult to motivate them. But after a little over an hour, the girl I was tutoring finally finished her homework, and it appeared that there wasn't anything left for me to do in the tutoring room. There were three tutors there already and three kids, and one of them was an older girl who said she didn't need help with her homework, so really there were three tutors for two kids. I thought having a two-to-one tutor-to-student ratio would be a little over the top, so when the girl I'd been tutoring asked me to go play with her, I agreed.
We played four square after she convinced some other kids to join us, and I quickly learned that four square had changed a lot since I was a kid. They had things separate from just bouncing the ball into each other's squares; now there was something called "cherry bomb", where you had to jump out of the playing square. If you were the last person to jump out, you were out of the game and the next person in line joined in. Also, if the "king" or "queen" said "bus stop" and put their foot in a certain place on any line in the playing square, everyone else had to run up and put their foot in the same spot. Again, if you were the last person to get your foot right next to the "king" or "queen's," you were out. The "king" or "queen" could yell any of these things at any point when the ball was not in play, and they did so quite frequently. Sometimes multiple times in a row, alternating between "cherry bombs" and "bus stops." Personally, I found the extra running around completely exhausting. However, the kids seemed exhilarated and energized by it, and often wound up rolling on the floor laughing (literally) either because of someone falling, someone being last and getting upset about it, or from the sheer enjoyment of playing the game. And soon, I felt young again. Someone would tell me I was out, and I would quickly give my rebuttal of why I wasn't out. Whenever I caught myself doing this I would quickly straighten up, cease arguing, and state that I was out and step back in line, reminding myself that I was an adult now, and this was just a silly little game that didn't really matter. Furthermore, I had real-life, adult things to worry about, and couldn't afford to waste my energies on child's play.
Oh how quickly the good die young.
No comments:
Post a Comment