Career Day

Yesterday I was a speaker in Angela's classes for John Burroughs Middle School's career day. It was a good day, I always love visiting her classes mostly because I'm stared at a bit like an animal in the zoo.

"Are you and Ms. Knapp sisters?"
"Why do you and Ms. Knapp have the same last name?"
"I thought you were Ms. Knapp."
"Are you and Ms. Knapp twins?"
"Do you have a brother that looks like you?"

Yesterday was no exception but I also turned the tables on them a bit. I opened my career day discussion by asking them if they hated writing. Most said yes, happily. I asked them if they knew what a screenwriter was. Most of them did not. And then I just smiled and nodded when one child told me he thought my job sounded very easy. I wish.

All in all, a good day. One student told Angela I encouraged her to write seven stories about seven different animals. I think this came mostly from the prompt I had them write about for a few minutes: hippos who were found in the parking lot of their school. But still, it was pretty cool. And some of their stories about how the hippos got there or what they were doing was very imaginative. We had hippos who had come down from outer space via spaceship. We had hippos who had stolen a Ferrari. We had hippos who were there to go to school and hippos who were there to eat cars and students. We had hippos who carried signs protesting the legalization of pot. They were a creative bunch.

And the energy. You know, when you're in the trenches it's different, you don't notice how much energy they have and you have to give but I was reminded of it yesterday. And I was only there part of the day. God bless all the teachers out there. Seriously. If you know a teacher, do something kind for her. Tell her she's doing a good job. Take him a $5 gift card to Subway. Offer to watch her kids on the weekend for an hour. Seriously. You have no idea what they go through.

So yeah. Career day. I had fun, I'm hoping the kids learned something. And maybe, just maybe, I encouraged one of them to put pencil to paper and explore themselves a little bit.