Overheard in a Classroom: You can't script this stuff.

I volunteer in a reading mentors program at the local elementary school twice a week.

Now, today I'm sitting with my first-session student at a desk on one side of a big, blue, wooden divider. I cannot see the mentors or students who sit on the other side, but I can generally recognize them by their voices.

But today, there was a new-ish mentor that I had not met sitting on the other side of the divider. 

I never saw the young man who was assigned to her, but I did not recognize his voice as being one of the ones I'm used to. He was reading some sort of booklet on geography with his mentor. (Now, keep in mind that these kids are seven-and-eight year olds, so it wasn't anything too terrible. Or rather, it shouldn't have been. The little boy evidently thought that world geography ought to be rewritten.

I heard the mentor ask the boy if he could point out Brazil on the map in the book. His reply? "No. These maps! They lie to me!" Startled, the woman gently pointed out that he really shouldn't be telling a book that it was lying. There was the sound of a metal chair being pushed back, and the boy shouted, "THESE MAPS ARE LIES!" My eight-year-old turns and looks around the corner of the divider, then turns and gives me this wide-eyed stare, then giggles. I put my energy into trying to get her to focus on her lesson again, dismissing from my mind the unusual dialogue going on next to us.

Until this happened:

Very curiously, the boy asked, "What is metal?" By the sound of his voice, I pictured him tilting his head to one side, perched in his chair. Flustered, the woman trying to help him with his lesson floundered for an answer. She began to mumble about playgrounds and table-legs, cutting off her words mid-sentence several times. Finally, she mumbled, "Your chair is metal." The little one seemed to accept that for the moment, but about two seconds later, I heard him pipe up, "Are you metal?" Shocked, the poor mentor managed, after a stunned silence, to say, "No dear, I am human." "No?" the boy asked thoughtfully, "Well I am. My head is like a rock."

I kid you not, that is literally what he said. And I never even saw him. I have no idea who he was.

Needless to say, the mentor had no ready reply for this, and tried to redirect him to his lesson. I was sort of glad that my own student was not overly distracted by this.