Teacher tales

Yesterday I had parent-teacher conferences. In the typical discussions of how they were doing (just fine), I heard a couple of funny stories.

I was waiting for the conference and looking at what the teacher had posted outside her classroom. There was a chart entitled "Counting by twos". It had a series of pictures (for two, then four, six on up to ten) where there were pictures of two kids each on them that all the kids had drawn. I noticed at least four pictures that had "Sasha" and "Erika" written on them. When I asked the teacher about the poster, she said that before making the poster, the class had a discussion about things that came in twos. "Twins!" was the first response. They discussed other things as well but when it came time to vote on what to draw on the poster, the class voted on twins. Most of the class drew pictures of Sasha and Erika.

The second story the teacher related something that happened in the library. The girls and their friend Maren were picking out library books and were sitting by the chapter books. The teacher was concerned that they were picking out books that were too advanced and so asked them if they could really read the whole book. Maren replied that her mom told her that if she could read one page of a book and made less then five mistakes (she held up her open hand at this point), she could read the book. "We're going to do that to make sure we can read the book" they all said. When the teacher looked over a few minutes later, all three of them were sitting on the floor reading out loud with their hands in the air counting how many mistakes they made. "We made less than five - we can read the books!" they declared when they were done.