No, I've never been to Jupiter....

Going to my Grade 7 English class is often the worst part of my day.  No matter what I've tried, how I've approached them, they're just...  disrespectful little assholes 95% of the time.  Add to that the fact that they are all going to Grade 8 thanks to Namibia's genius (read: counterproductive) transfer system (a learner can only fail once between Grade 5 and 7, after repeating one grade the learner is "transferred" through grades until the junior secondary phase, which begins in Grade 8), all my learners are going to Grade 8 if they want to, regardless of whether or not they pass Grade 7. 

Because of this, Grade 7 has been a struggle for me the entire year.  It's really hard to motivate learners that age to do anything they don't have to, especially if they know that they're advancing to Grade 8 with little to no effort.  On top of it, the class as a whole is  incredibly disrespectful and has a severe case of senioritis. 

Like I said: the worst part of my day.

I gave them homework last night, was going to collect and mark it today, but when I got to class, half of them told me that they'd forgotten their workbooks at home. 

(It's relevant to add that yesterday was such an amazing today, today I had amazing-day-hangover.  Not a literal hangover.  Today just had no chance of being as good as Monday and Tuesday.  And I didn't sleep well last night, so I was incredibly tired today.)

My grade 6 lesson plans collapsed today, and I was having a hard time coming up with something to do with Grade 7 that didn't require workbooks, text books, or paper of any kind.  I'd taken with me a poster of the solar system, so i decided to just go with that and have just talking time. We talked about the sun being a star. We talked about the orbits around the sun and how that creates the seasons and years.  We talked about Earth's axis and its rotation and why it's light in Gobabis at 10:30 am but it's still dark in NYC at that time (4:30am EDT).  We talked about the other planets and gravity and all kinds of space crap.  (For those of you who know me well, I was transported back to being a kid when I wanted to go to space camp and studied the stars and the planets and astro-nerdy things).  We talked about what you need to do to leave Earth, and how on other planets there's less gravity, so if you went there, you'd just float around. Then this:

"Miss, have you ever been to Jupiter?"

Uhhhhh.

No......  I've never left Earth.

Let's go back to what you have to do to leave Earth and travel into space....  You have to be an astronaut to travel around space. Astronauts are really smart and study a long time.

Then:

"Miss, if you leave Earth, and you look at it from space, will it look like that, all blue and green?" (In reference to the poster of the solar system.)  I tried, I'm sure futilely, to explain the picture from the moon of the earth "rising" in its beautiful glory.  I then told them that I'd try to find an appropriate space dvd to show them so that they could see these kinds of things.  Easier said than done.  I decided on the 1980s movie Space Camp, I think they'll be into, at least a little. 

At the end of the period, one of the boys said, "Miss, this is a very nice period." I mean, nice probably because they actually LEARNED interesting things, and didn't mind.  And it was one of the first days I walked out of Grade 7 without having wanted to stick my face in a pillow and scream.

Thanks for reading. :)