teaching?

It's weird passing through my old broad ways and avenues. A teacher asked me last week if I had ever taught before, because it seemed I could clearly remember what it was like to be a kid back in those uncomfortable chairs. I took it as an immense compliment, but more striking - I hadn't even thought of it. I pass through my eight grade experience every day, taking the same bus I did then. And it's filled each way with the children from that school who now occupy my old seats and terrorise my old teachers. How could I forget really, what it was like to be there? It surrounds me everyday. The plucking sound of strange afterthoughts filling the echo space between the walls 'round my brain. Wishing to be unseen, but noticed. Talked to, not down to. 

Funny enough, I find something is true for these little ones the same as it is for the septuagenarian set. I can't talk to anyone my age. I've never really liked my age set. It's not the generation I wanted to be a part of. I wanted the nineteenth century, where it was all right to be a little obtuse. As long as you had the gravitas and brut brilliance to surprise them in the end. That's always been the object of my learning curve. Slow, but sweetly entranced by the thoughtful and serious side of life. I've always been able to get on much better with those whom clearly had set in to or were well past their mid life crisis. Two of my best friends are 52 and 57.

But here I am getting on perfectly well, and in fact, rather enjoyably with these lovely little splendours - none of whom have exceeded the threshold of 11 years. I think most people in between are so worried about everything facile that they have lost their intrepidity and thirst for new states. There's no competition in high school, but setting a timed task before a second grade class is liking tossing a skirt steak into shark infested waters. They voraciously devour anything you give them. And they are still refreshingly without sarcasm but posses some of the most biting wit I've ever heard. 

I've never taught before, and I still haven't. They're teaching me.