Straight No Chaser

Nerds Again, or, You Can Quote Me On This

a handful of quotes that encapsulate my cty experience thus far:

i don't want to go to recess; can i just read my book?

what happens if i read past page sixty-three, is it, like, illegal, or something?

joey's still in the bathroom; he said he dropped his inhaler in the trashcan!

i don't eat fruit; can i have grapes for dessert instead?

and so on, and so forth.

these kids prefer intense passage analysis to regular-people recess. i have tried, repeatedly, to get each or all of them to go outside and play, to engage in this game or that icebreaker, and have been refused, repeatedly, by each or all of them. it is hysterically frustrating to fight an eight-year-old over whether he's "allowed" to curl up in a corner with harriet the spy and get ahead on his reading assignments for the following monday. one could call it inspiring.

but then there's this one kid, we'll call him ed (not his name), and a couple other milder versions of him, who continuously capitalize on the fact that they are known savants and overachievers. i say, once it's been established that i'm not going to stop you from reading ahead, or going the extra mile on the homework assignment, there is no further need to ask me about it, especially not twenty minutes later. they are impressive, yes, but let's not forget, i was a hundred-pages-a-pop kid too, and i know that reading a lot when you like to read isn't really all that commendable.

"joey" did drop his inhaler in the trashcan today before lunch, a problem i couldn't address because it happened in the boys' bathroom. a few individual interrogations later, i found out he did it on purpose because he didn't want to go to recess, surprise surprise.

grapes are a fruit, right? one particularly persuasive fourth-grader almost convinced me otherwise, after half an hour of debate at lunchtime.

i generally hate quotes. i'm not convinced that eleanor roosevelt was the first to experience or express any profound emotion. which is not to say that she never said anything astute, just that i'd like to think each of her pearls was simply an echo of something stated earlier at a roman forum, african village, blah blah.