Miss Emily, Bearer of Maple Syrup

Well, another portion of my job began this week; I substitute taught five classes for an English teacher that was out of town. That's right; five classes in three days, with no prior teaching experience. But it wasn't nearly as harrowing as I expected it to be.
Well, OK, subbing ninth-graders (third formers) during the last period class on Friday was somewhat harrowing, particularly during the last fifteen minutes of class. I was trying to come up with an activity that was more enjoyable than simple vocab exercises, but the only activity that he kids appeared to be interested in was shrieking, gossiping and causing increasing amounts of mayhem as the final bell of the day approached.
However, I also subbed three class periods for a group of seventh graders who were a whole lot of fun. On the first day we read "I Hear America Singing" by Walt Whitman. I was of course very excited to be teaching Whitman, even on a very basic level. We went through the poem very slowly, going over vocabularly words like "varied", "carols", "mason", "blithe", etc. I just wanted them to understand the poem in a very literal sense, but one girl made me extremely hapy by raising her hand and explaining in very good English that "It's not about real singing, it's about all of the sounds of America together combining into a sort of beautiful sound, and the poet thinks it's kind of like a song." Of course, being a seventh grader, she had to add "and I like the part about mothers and women singing, because I think girls sing better than boys." This lead to a heated debate about the comparable musical abilities of each gender, and at the end of class I let anyone who wanted to come up and sing for the class. We had two musical numbers: a boy who imitated an Opera singer, and a group of girls who sang something from the Phantom of the Opera, but substituted 'La La La' for all the words they did not know, which were most of the words.
On Friday we had a double period together, and the lesson was about the first Thanksgiving. I realized pretty quickly that Greek kids really don't know anything about Thanksgiving at all; I explained that "it's a holiday celebrating the pilgrims and how they made it through the first winter," and the kids all looked confused and asked "what's a pilgrim?"
As a matter of fact, the two class periods devoted to the Thanksgiving lesson were filled with questions that I found completely adorable. "Miss, what is Mass...a...Shoo...Setts?" "What is a Conn-Eck-Ti-Kut?" "What is Pumpkin?" I showed them all a map of New England and drew a picture of a Jack-O-Lantern on the board, and they seemed to recognize that.
They were a pretty sharp bunch of kids, as evidenced by their reaction to a picture of the Mayflower in their readers. "Look at this boat!" One of them said. "It's old. But look at the boat behind it.That's not right" I looked, and sure enough, in the picture, there appeared to be a speedboat behind the Mayflower. I laughed, and explained that it was probably a picture of the Mayflower's modern day replica, not the Mayflower itself.
My favorite questions, though, had to do with maple syrup. The lesson explained how Squanto and Samoset taught the pilgrims to tap maple trees for sap, a fact which was somewhat complicated to explain to kids that aren't really familiar with maple syrup. "They drilled holes in trees," I said, "and they took the sticky stuff out, that's the sap. And then they boiled it somehow, and it became a syrup, a little bit like honey."
This explanation was met with a lot of puzzled expressions. "Like Resin?" asked one girl. "I put resin on my violin, and it comes from a tree."
"Eww!" shrieked her neighbor, "But you don't eat the stuff on your violin."
"But you can make retsina with it!" one kid piped up.
"Exactly!" I said. "Retsina comes from trees, too."
However, one kid still was not satisfied. "Miss Emily?" he asked, "Who had the idea to make sap into syrup?"
"The Native Americans did." I said. "They taught the pilgrims how to do it."
"But how did the Native Americans get the idea?"
"I don't know. I guess they were experimenting, and they found it it tasted good."
He looked doubtful. "Someone just said 'OK, I will take this sticky stuff from a tree and boil it and eat it?"
I had to admit, the kid had a point.
"Well, " I finally managed, "Whose idea was it to take stuff from pine trees and make wine from it?"
That seemed to stump them. However, we didn't pursue the topic, because the bell rang for break, and I went back to my apartment and dug out the container of maple syrup that my sister sent me from Vermont a few weeks back. I also bought a few kuluri (sesame seed covered dough sticks) and cut them into pieces, and brought the whole mess back to the classroom, where I informed the kids that they could try some maple syrup when we finished the lesson. This caused a general wave of excitement to spread across the room, because of course, there's nothing that gets the attention of kids more than food, especially sugary food.
"Hey!" I shouted, trying to get their attention, "settle down, please!" there was no reponse. "Hey!" I tried again, louder. Still nothing.
"Alright!" I called, one last time, "You can try the maple syrup, but first you have to settle down. Endaxi?"
The kids shut up immediately and stared at me. I could see them all thinking the same thing: "She speaks Greek?" It's amazing the effect that one simple word like Endaxi ("all right") can have.
While we finished the last few paragraphs about Thanksgiving, I passed around the maple syrup bottle, which featured pictures of people taking sap from trees. After a few more minutes of reading, including a tough time wading through a 17th century quote from William Bradford ("Miss, what does "hath" mean? What is this "unto"?) I finally poured some maple syrup onto a plate and let them dip the pieces of kuluri in to sample it. It was an interesting combination. They seemed to like the maple syrup pretty well. Unfortunately, I had to rush to clean up the sticky disaster that was left behind from having twenty seventh graders rushing to have the first taste. As I said good bye, one of the kids asked "When will you teach us again? So we can have some more of this?"
I guess it's a universal rule; food will always win affection.