Am I Smarter Than A 5th Grader?

Hmmm …. am I smarter than a 5th grader, is a thought I pondered this week. Do you remember that television show? While I am not sure of the answer to that question, I know I am learning A LOT! I started as a special education aide in a 5th-grade class in September, and I have to say, I love it. Some things I am recalling, but crazy enough, so much sounds brand new to my brain.

I am happy going to school every day, but I didn’t feel that way as a kid. As a child with a severe lack of self-esteem, I was not too fond of school. Even as an adult, I was still experiencing the recurring nightmare of walking down the hall naked while all the kids laughed at me. But here I am at 58, loving it and soaking up all the 5th-grade knowledge! I am the old lady in the back sitting on my stool secretly learning.

Math, for example …

I am seriously excited when the teacher asks what the bottom number of a fraction is, and in my head, I am screaming DENOMINATOR. So proud of myself for even remembering! I really want to raise my hand and participate, but I control my juvenile tendencies and let the boys and girls answer.

This one blew my mind … did you know that if you add all of the digits together in a number that you can tell if that number is divisible by 3? For instance, take 2,541 – 2+5+4+1 = 12 and 12 is divisible by 3 so 2,541 is too. Crazy! I thought it was the coolest thing! Give it a try!

Do you know what PEMDAS is? It is the order of operations in a math problem. Parenthesis, exponents, multiplication, division, addition, and subtraction. So 3 x (5+4) + 15-3(6-2) = ______ Let’s see if you are smarter than a 5th grader, and I will tell you at the end. Two weeks ago, I would never have gotten the right answer.

These kids love to read far more than I did back in the day.

This past week the class started reading Home of the Brave by Katherine Applegate. What did I do? I paid to download it on my iPad so I could read along with everyone. I enjoyed our first book, Schooled, by Gordon Korman so much that I had to do it. While I didn’t have a copy of that book, I worked on my listening skills while the teacher read aloud in class. I was quite impressed by myself as it gave me the chance to improve my focus and, late in life, self-diagnosed ADHD.

I don’t remember reading books like this as a 10-year-old, but Schooled is about bullying a new kid in school and the lessons learned by the students doing the bullying. Although perfect for this age group, it is also great for adults. I could relate to having been the new kid in school a couple of times in life.

Home of the Brave is about a boy, Kek, who arrives in the Midwest from a refugee camp in Sudan. It’s my first experience reading a book written in verse. As we read and discuss, I realize this is when these 5th graders are smarter than me. Their grasp of figurative language is so much better than mine, and finding examples came easy to them. They reference a flying boat returning to earth in the first sentence, and I blew right over it. The students knew it was a plane.

The teacher has students lead discussions after each reading, and I sit on my hands and participate in my head. The children pick up on more innuendo and feeling than I. So many times, I nod enthusiastically and think, “damn … good point,” when that 5th grader picks up on an underlying emotion or metaphor that I missed.

Did you ever hear of Jo Ann Robinson?

The first time I heard her name was this past week while watching a video on Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. She was a teacher and college professor who became involved with the Woman’s Political Council, a civic organization for African American professional women. Ms. Robinson was verbally attacked for sitting in the whites-only section of a bus in Montgomery, Alabama, long before Rosa Parks. She was a considerable force behind The Montgomery Bus Boycott and one of the women who help give Dr. King the platform for one of the first successful boycotts on segregation. If I wasn’t in this 5th-grade class, would I have ever learned of this extraordinary woman? I don’t think so.

While I have learned about waning and waxing moons and the other constellations besides the dippers, I am really digging the science experiments. The kids are currently working on writing procedures for investigations. They were assigned to write step-by-step instructions on separating salt, sand, and gravel in the same cup using specific tools and supplies. Well, this week, I walked around watching the kids try out their written procedures, all the while not having a clue how they were going to do this. When I first heard the lesson, I thought the teacher might have given them an impossible task.

How the heck do you separate them using a cup, water, coffee filter, syringe, thin screen, and some plastic thing whose name escapes me? I get the gravel part, but how do you separate salt and sand? This is one of the things I look forward to learning this week, along with more on Dr. King, Jo Ann Robinson, and Kek as we continue to read more about how he adjusts to America.

So am I smarter than a fifth grader? 

I am most definitely smarter when it comes to life, but in the classroom, I feel like a kid again listening and learning with innocence, excitement, and an open heart right along with them.

As I am writing this, it occurs to me that maybe being in this class is another gift from God. I don’t remember very much growing up; my memory is clouded by the abuse and other events that stripped me of my self-esteem.   But maybe God’s plan is to give me back some of my youth and the chance to help those kids who may need it as I did.  What an amazing blessing that is!

Wow … I love it when I figure things out.

Wishing you all love, peace, and a moment of clarity this week,

Sandy 

The answer to the math problem above is 30. Who got it right???