every year, i teach the novel "tuck everlasting" to my 7th graders. before we read the novel, we do some thought questions. it's basically a "would you rather....?" routine. well, one of the questions has always hurt my feelings because in the past, i've been really sad and depressed about not having children. but now that i'm getting older, and children are more and more of a pipedream, the question today was more of an experiment for me. the question was "would you rather be a good parent or a successful businessperson with no kids?" when i read the question today with no catch in my throat, i realized i'm finally getting through the grief of infertility and might be able to move on. and when i walked around the room as the kids were discussing their answers (there were about 10 questions total) with each other, i noticed i was looking at their papers to see what they picked on question 4, lol. out of about 50 kids, 45 picked "good parent." i figured it would be a higher number, but 10% cf isn't too bad. i listened to them defend their reasons too. very interesting. 1 of them has a very strange background which i won't get into on a public forum. but i was really interested to know her answer and her reasons considering the childhood she's had. some of the other kids whom i figured would say "good parent" and didn't really surprised me. i didn't get to hear everyone's reasons because it was group work, and a roomful of 12-year-olds defending their choices can get rather loud. so as i walked around, i heard snippets of conversations that were so cool. some kids had great arguments. others sounded pretty lame. but it was nice to find out their opinions about some things. some questions like "would you rather be popular or have the highest grade in your class?" were met with almost 100% "be popular." that kind of scared me. yikes.
anyway, it was eye-opening. just wanted to share.
