Random moments with kids

I have this one student, C, who came into my class at the halfway point of the year. She's 10 years old but seems younger, maybe because her learning disability has set back her reading level, or maybe because she's spent a few years in the transition classroom, where each year her classmates were a little younger than she. I used to work with her on a pull-out basis in the afternoon where her short attention span and weak short-term memory would drive me kind of crazy. Now that she's in my reading and writing class I enjoy her much more, I think because I've been able to adopt a sense of humor when it comes to her sometimes eccentric behavior. She often will ask or tell me things that seem like total non sequitirs. On Friday I was in the middle of a lesson on the short I sound, literally mid-sentence, when I hear her little voice: "Do you love B?"

Also, a 5th grader informed me, when I remarked on how strange it was that we'd had so little snow all winter and are now getting lots of it, "It's not spring, it's winter." When I tried to argue that according to the calendar, it was in fact spring, he dismissed me with this rock-solid logic: "If it's snowing, it's winter."

And finally, today in Math, a student picked up a laminated equals sign I'd made for a hands-on algebra lesson, wrote me a little note, and taped it to my bin of math supplies. I discovered it on the way back to my own classroom: "What will you name your son if you have 1?"

A child's mind is a nearly impossible thing to predict.