harry potter

On Tuesday, being the huge nerd that I am, I wore a Gryffindor tie and scarf to school. In the previous weeks, I had planned a movie trip with some of my favorite students to go see the newest Harry Potter. So after school, I hopped a train with 12 kids and went down to Lincoln Center (ooooh, the mysterious world of Manhattan) to see the movie. I would now like to recount all of the terrible things I said or did.

1. One of my kids didn't have subway fare because his mom called me last minute asking if he could go and someone else offered to pay for his movie ticket. Instead of buying him a pass or something, I looked at him, decided he looked young enough, and told him to just crawl under the lever. Aaah, stealing, an important life lesson.

2. On the train, a discussion came up about age, and I gathered them around to give them two important life lessons. "One: never ask a woman her age. I personally don't care, but most women don't like that. Two: never ask a woman if she's pregnant. Because if she's not, you just called her fat. Got it?" They all nodded and laughed. I looked around the car to see a bunch of mostly white faces looking at me in either disgust or surprise or pleasure, I'm not sure. When we got off, one man walked by me, smiled, repeated rule #1, and said, "That's good. I like that. Very important."

3. As we were walking to the theater, one of my boys started telling me about how he really enjoyed (and was good at) throwing peanuts in the air and catching them in his mouth. I almost choked with laughter. Juvenile sense of humor, check.

4. When we went to buy the tickets, I instructed everyone to give me the cash. The age for a child's tickets cuts off at 12; a good half of my group was 13 or older. I bought one adult ticket and 12 children's tickets. Dude, come on, it saved so much money. But lying, another important life lesson. Glad that one really sunk in.

5. I bought popcorn and chicken strips for everyone to share and instructed them each to buy their own soda or candy. Childhood obesity, hell yeah, let's make it happen. Also, one of the girls got so sick that she almost threw up.

6. Aaaaand, on the way back, a lot of them couldn't figure out the subway gates where you actually have to slide in and push it like a revolving door. So we had to double up to get everybody through. Again, this whole lying/cheating/stealing message, I really wanted to hit it home.

That being said, we had a lot of fun, and it was a good opportunity for everyone to experience something they might not have been able to experience otherwise. Plus, no one died or got injured on the trip. So far, I'm batting 1000. I'd like to keep that up.

field trips

I gave my kids a survey and asked them to write down any ideas they had for field trips, either just for fun or educational. These are true responses:

"Can we go to the top of McGraw Hill?"

"I would like to go anywhere but the Bronx Zoo, I don't go think I can go there again without my head exploding."

I also had a real discussion with one boy about how awesome it would be to go to the sandwich factory. Is this a real thing? I guess so.