Not a Teapot

I teach sixth grade science. Today’s topic: Diagnosing broken bones. I am not an expert on this topic, but I had a hunch that one particular student might have a fair amount of personal knowledge to impart. It was Friday, and sixth-graders (okay, and sixth grade teachers) tend to get restless by Friday, so I decided to deviate from my standard way of teaching.

I was also analyzing data from a survey, so I had standard deviations on the brain.

Before class started, I asked my student if he would be willing to stand in front of the class and let us interview him. He is a fine young lad, and I cherished the experience of getting to know him better upon his consenting to my lesson plan.

Last year, he broke his arm. He broke it in such a way that the doctors put a cast on it, except for not a normal cast. This cast sort of hoisted his arm, from the elbow upward, into the air with the fingers pointing out away from him. Quite frankly, he looked like a little teapot. I think he got a lot of teapot jokes, so I tried not to rub it in.

He got the cast off a few weeks ago. This week his arm came back in a sling, though, because I think he did something dumb like hit his brother and re-broke the teapot arm. No teapot cast this time, but the arm is broken again in the same place.

So he stood at the front of the room and let us ask him a gazillion and one personal questions about his injuries, and he even sounded very scholarly at times and drew diagrams on the board, probably because he’s seen half a dozen doctors and had this stuff explained to him repeatedly for the past couple of months. And besides, when you let kids talk about stuff that’s personal and important to them, it ends up taking on a certain quality that’s real and deep.

His presentation was fascinating, but what I really want to talk about is what happened when his time was up and he needed to return to his seat. See, I borrow the classroom of a teacher who teaches seventh-graders about weather and climate. At the front of the room, along the wall that our young orthopedic expert was leaning against for the better part of an hour, were several student-produced posters of clouds. The clouds were assembled with cotton and glue.

Out of respect for Teapot Boy, I carefully avoided calling him “Cotton Tail”, afraid that it might stick.