Switching gears

Mondays through Fridays I prod and poke my 10th graders along. Really I enjoy it a lot. I like conning kids into doing their work and then seeing them actually retain the material. (For this Caesar test it is going to be the "sleepers" in the class that do well . . . don't ask me why, but they are the ones that can answer the review questions).

Sundays I switch gears entirely and pull out all my long buried children's knowledge and teach 5th and 6th grade. It is probably a good break but it is fun pulling out the scissors that cut funny shapes, crayons, magazines and making cards for the leadership in the church. Today the only kid I had that showed up was pulling out all the questions he had been saving up all week. First he asked who Pope John Paul III was going to be. . I told him I didn't know and then tried to explain what a pope was, just so we were on the same page. Then he asked me what girl popes were called.

"What? Girl popes? They don't have girl popes."

"Yeah, you know girl popes. They are like married to God. What are they called?"

"Oh, you mean nuns. Nuns aren't really the same thing as a girl pope."

"What does it mean to be married to God?"

"Well, it is their way of saying that they are dedicating their lives to God and his ministry instead of getting married."

"Can they fly?"

"What?"

"Can the...what do you call them?"

"Nuns"

"Yeah, can nuns fly?"

"No, that was just a movie."

We went back to the lesson from there. I can only assume that The Flying Nun was on TV yesterday. And just for those of you who are wondering what I teach in Sunday School, we were studying baptism. You can't get much more doctrinally sound than that.