“What happens to a piece of paper when you throw it away?”
Gloriana doesn’t hesitate: “You shouldn’t do that. You
should turn it over and write on the back of it.”
“Um,” I manage in response, “right.” I cast about, feebly,
“But what about when you’ve written all over it and then you throw it away—what happens to it then?”
Gloriana regards me for a minute, then sighs. “People
shouldn’t be wasting things.”
I can’t argue with her, of course, not least because she is
seven (and correct), but I am growing increasingly certain I will not be able
to explain to her what decompose
means if she won’t let me throw something out. Otherwise all I have to draw on
are dead bodies and I didn’t even think about trees or leaves or organic nature
stuff until three days later and wow there’s nothing like a super-literal
seven-year-old to throw me off my game. We muddle our way through this
definition and then to my horror I realize our next challenge is to write out—in
one sentence—how plastic is made.
Go ahead. How the f*ck is plastic made? And if you actually know the answer, could you help a second-grader explain it in a single sentence? If so, you are a much better classroom volunteer than I and I implore you to look for dates that might suit your calendar.
Fortunately, these children were allowed to use laptops to
do research, and so Gloriana ended up watching a pretty good video that
documented the whole process but it was so complicated both of us immediately
forgot all the parts in the middle. In the end, her explanation read: “Plastic
is made by oil. The oil is made by a pipeline and when it gets liquidey they
put it in a mold and let it cool,” and my hand to god I did not help even a
little bit unless you count refusing to correct “liquidey” because that should
absolutely be a word.
Second graders are, for the most part, still so small. It’s all narrow little shoulders
and skinny little arms and corduroy pants and missing front teeth and knowing
words like “mold” but still trusting adults and if a person could bottle seven,
it would probably smell like pencil shavings and juice box and concentration
and wonder with just a hint of fresh air and notes of curiosity and unvarnished
delight.
These second graders were reading a
book about a subway car that gets a second life as an artificial reef,
which is actually very cool for non-seven-year-olds too, and now each had
chosen a material (plastic, wood, metal, glass, fabric) and were tasked with
answering a series of questions about where it came from, how long it lasted,
and what could be done to repurpose objects made from it. I volunteered with
two classes and in the first I had a group of four kids that turned out really
to be three because one was a lovely sweet boy who could not read or write*,
and in the second I had the precocious Gloriana, who assigned herself to come
up with sixteen ways to reuse plastic
objects, instead of just the suggested five.
Again, the internet to the rescue—Gloriana expertly
navigated to YouTube and to our mutual surprise and delight there is an endless supply of how-to videos
showcasing increasingly elaborate and implausible ways to repurpose plastic
objects. I watched Gloriana watching these videos, fascinated by how she was
savvy enough to ignore some of the really ridiculous ideas—the ones that
involved a hot glue gun or the drilling of holes or some combination of these
only to reuse a snip of the bottle in service of creating something absurd,
like a little plastic shield, which looked kind of like a welder’s mask for a
cat, and was meant to be worn over the fingers while chopping vegetables.
Kitchen knife accidents are a real issue, I am well aware, but I am pretty sure
a cat welding mask made from the side of a Sprite bottle and a rubber band
should not be the first line of defense there.
When Gloriana saw a reuse idea she liked, she’d hit the
space bar to pause the video and then turn, big wow smile, to check my reaction. Of course I gave her wow eyes and an encouraging nod each
time, because what kind of monster tells a kid that if she needs a broom, the
best course of action is unlikely to be scaring up an X-Acto knife and 6 empty
one-liter soda bottles—even if those two hours of labor might result in a
pretty cool looking but maybe not super efficient tool, and also where the heck
are you supposed to get a broom handle if you don’t already have a broom, YouTube???
For the record, and in case you have a bunch of plastic
lying around, her list of 16 ideas ended up being:
* “Can you read me
this sentence?” My question was innocent, just trying to get him involved in
the project. He looked me in the eye and said, “No,” and there was something
about the way he answered me, just so purely honest and open and unashamed that
I was caught flat-footed and without an idea of anything else to do I let him
watch (topic-related!) videos for the whole class, his graphic organizer left
blank.
Speaking of which: I'm
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