Hmm. This is the second brag post in a row-- but I did promise to tell you this story in the last post, so I'll do this one and then maybe next time I will talk about some of the things I've been messing up lately. (But no promises!)
Anyway. About halfway through the school year, I was having some difficulty getting the some of the seventh-graders I supervise at lunch to clean up after themselves. One day, I was feeling extra frustrated, and followed a couple of kids from the cafeteria to the library to see if they had been the ones to leave a particularly bad mess. They denied it, but said someone else had done it. I duly went and asked the someone else, but of course he denied as well. I went home pretty steamed about the whole thing, and decided that the best thing would be to sit with them at the table to make sure that I knew who was leaving what.
But as I thought about it that evening, I realized that my presence might not just be a little bit unwelcome; it might be very unwelcome, and I could get kids so upset about me being there that it would distract from my real purpose of figuring out who was causing the messes. I needed a strategy.
Luckily, I had been recently working on learning how to draw a Corvette. I had incorrectly assumed that I would be able to easily get the length of time it took me to draw it down to, oh, say, ten minutes so that I could teach it to my young library patrons during a special lunch hour when (with knowledge and consent from my lunch captain) I would not be in the lunch room but the library. All this was to no avail. My drawing time remains stubbornly at about the half hour mark, and the student (who really is good at drawing) who had volunteered to be my helper took even longer.
So, I had given up on the drawing project in terms of library programming, but as I was thinking about how to not make myself stinky, as it were, to a table full of boys, it occurred to me that if I were to draw a sports car, they might be interested enough not to mind me.
And that was exactly how it worked. The first day, they just watched. When a couple of them got up without taking their trays, I (without yelling, because they were right there) asked them to please come back for them, and they did so without complaint. The second day, I just reminded everyone as they stood up. The third day, they needed no reminder at all.
But this was the other interesting thing. One of the boys--I think on the first day-- said, "That isn't so hard. I can do that." And I genuinely thought that he might. Some kids spend HUGE amounts of time on drawing every day, and I thought if he was one of them, it might be cool for him to get to beat an adult at a skill both he and his peers valued.
The kid who had been helping me prepare for the drawing lesson that never happened remained silent. He knew from personal experience how hard it was to draw a good looking car.
And this is what happened: within about twenty seconds, it was very, very obvious that I had won. And normally I find impromptu contests annoying, especially when the contest is uneven-- yes, even when I'm the one who has the advantage, as in this case. But in this case, victory was SWEET, because every single one of those boys cleaned his tray up every day after that, and the boy who had challenged me happened to also be one who used to try to cut in line every day, and I would always have to harangue him to go back, and after that he just stopped, for most of the rest of the school year. And, basically, anything I asked him to do (which isn't much-- I'm really not that much of a dragon) he would just DO.
This is the thing. I know that I'm above-average at drawing, and yes, it's a real skill, and yes, it's great, but most of the time I feel like being good at drawing, in terms of my-life-usefulness, is a bit like having extra-handsome elbows: great as far as it goes, but not that useful. Except, this time it was! Like I said, SWEET!
And the epilogue happened a couple of weeks ago. My lunch captain, who is one of the school counselors and also one of my friends, came up to me and told me that our school custodian had told her that she thought our lunch team (meaning, the adults who supervise the seventh-graders during lunch) did a very good job. And my friend/captain said that she thought that was mostly me, and I think that this is at least a little bit true, and I was absolutely chuffed that my little old handsome-elbow-drwaing skills got me to the point of earning compliments from the custodial staff. I'll take it any day. :)
(N.B. I have grand planz to update this post soon with at least a picture of one of my drawings, but I don't have them with me at the moment, so I thank you in advance for your patience with me.)
