May 4, 2012
Rabies Babies
On Wednesday, at the insistence of my nephew Sam, I visited his class of 6 and 7 year-olds -- 3C at William Patten -- to talk about Antarctica. I was rather dreading this, since kids can be a pretty tough crowd, but as it turned out they were amazingly keen and well-behaved and charming, and the whole experience was lots of fun. I showed them a bunch of pictures and the travelogue vid and talked about icebergs and whales and penguins, and they asked many, many questions, some of which were pretty incisive and only a few of them very silly.
Ian: Did they ask if you saw any polar bears?
Of course they did.
They were also fascinated by gruesome death and easily wandered into fanciful discussions about what would happen if you fell off the ice into the sea and such. At one point I mentioned that coatis carry rabies -- we had, obviously, moved beyond Antarctica at this point -- and should therefore be treated with caution. Of course they had no idea what rabies is, and because the name sounds plural they assumed I was talking about some smaller animals, and someone immediately wanted to know what a baby raby looks like, and a fair bit of conversational cat-herding ensued.
It was pretty much my first time in a functioning primary school since I attended as a pupil myself, and that made for an odd experience. Some things were drastically different -- it was all a bit cleaner and nicer than I recollect things being in the 1970s, and they had video projection whiteboards in the classroom -- others not so much. They were just laying out the lunch tables as I was leaving, and that was a dizzyingly familiar sight. For a moment the intervening years dropped away; I was more than happy when they came back.
I have, it turns out, been in a school once or twice since those days, but they look different as polling stations. My own local one of those is no longer a school, anyway, but a public library. I went and did my duty yesterday, for all the good it's likely to do. Countrywide the coalition partners look like they've had a bit of a kicking, but our own odious mop-headed buffoon is probably going to retain the mayoralty. Blecch.
Posted by matt at May 4, 2012 12:29 PM