First Post -- Two Stories

I am terrible at starting new blogs. (Ew, what an icky word.) So, I will start off with two short anecdotes from the Saturday Academy at which I am currently teaching a three-child (all girls) Kindergarten class in West Philly.

1.) We are primarily a literacy program, so we start every day with the alphabet. Say the letter, say the sound, say a word that starts with that sound. "A-aah-apple. B-buh-boy." and so on down the list. We have letter cards, but they aren't illustrated, so I have to rely on the children to remember from their regular Kindergarten classes what the words are that they use. I repeat it on a slight lag with them, hoping they won't notice. The first time we did this, one of the little girls -- more advanced than her peers, incidentally -- got all the way down through U, and then let out with "V-vuh-Value Village!" I was, by turns, impressed and reminded that I am now living in a Completely Different World than the one I grew up in.

2.) On the subject of the latter of these impressions, last week I read the girls The Cat in the Hat for our midday story time. We got 2/3 of the way through the story -- it's raining, the children are bored, in comes the Cat, the Fish complains, the Cat wreaks havoc, the Fish yells, the Cat brings his Things and they wreak more havoc -- and then we get to the line, "And I said, I do not like/The way that they play. /If our mother could see this,/Oh, what would she say?" And another little girl -- below level, incidentally, she's really in first grade -- came back, without missing a beat, with "You want punishment."
It would have been funnier if I hadn't heard her mother yelling at her at breakfast that morning. ("Sit down! I oughta beat your behind!") It was still pretty funny though.