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Helen bayside sweet moments1/22/2024 ![]() ![]() Treasure them now, for their lilting exuberance, for their truths that surprise you, for their shrill, frank squeals of complaint. An intelligence close to my own slips into me, bearing the certainty that soon I’ll be gone once the semester ends I’ll move on. I note the straight black hair, the dark brown eyes, the smooth beige skin on this little human who is literally looking up to me. I pause a beat longer on that sweetly serious face, alight with the luminous glow of ten-year-old childhood, before zits and adolescent truculence have taken hold. It’s what I would say to any child importuning my attention when I am involved with someone else. ![]() “Miss Newman, you didn’t check my answer yet.” I move on to Catherine, who’s in the back row with the other two girls. Seule says that insects pollinate flowers. Salina says that sometimes animals carry seeds stuck in their fur, then drop them on nourishing patches of ground. My students’ task, at the moment, is to come up with an example of how plants and animals help each other. “And carnivores are the ones who eat other animals, right?” he asks. “Herbivores,” I tell him, and then spell the word out, at his request. If Salina and Seule are racing ponies, Henry is a good-natured draft horse-accepting of the plow he’s harnessed to, and determined to turn over every square inch of the field he pulls it through. He plods through worksheets, while others gallop he deliberates over his responses, printing them in careful, crooked letters. Henry is a quiet, thoughtful child, with a slow but twinkling sense of humor and, often, a hint of a grin tugging at the corners of his mouth. ![]() “Miss Newman, what do you call animals who eat plants?” Henry twists back and upwards to catch my attention. Which means that I must practice grace and agility, as I sidle from one desk to the next, checking written answers on worksheets.Īs I pivot from Salina’s desk to Seule’s. The seven ten-year-olds in my Monday-afternoon English class insist on cramming their desks into the front half of the drab but spacious classroom. I monitor my movements as I maneuver between the two rows of students, so as to avoid collision with heads or eyes or desktops, which all lurk far below eye level. Trapped in a forest of little chairs, I turn gingerly from Salina to Seule. ![]()
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