Too Sleepy To Be Silly!

Don't you just love to mess with kids? To joke around and carry on in a teasing manner? Well I do, but sometimes they're just not in the mood, as we grown-ups can relate to! The other morning, I had early morning bus duty at 7:10, and kids were trickling in in all stages of wakefulness. One ginger-haired first grader with a rare sober expression on his face sat down near me. I noticed that he had stylish new glasses, so I complimented him on them. Since they were black lined with white around the lenses, I said, "I love your new glasses! Those are ZEBRA glasses!" He jerked his head up and looked at me without smiling and shook his head. "Oh, they're not zebra glasses? Well they must be PIANO glasses." Again, he shook his head without a smile. "SOCCER BALL glasses?" I queried. "OREO glasses? NEWSPAPER glasses?" At this point the little fellow was all but rolling his eyes at me, which I would have understood under the circumstances. "They're not any kind of glasses," he said. "They're just plain glasses." "Okay," I said. "I get it. You're sleepy and really aren't in the mood to be silly, right?" Nodding his head, still without a glimmer of a smile, he said, "Right. I just want to be quiet right now." Well I guess there's bad news and good news in this tale. The bad news is that I apparently got on my little friend's very last nerve first thing in the morning, but the good news is that he stayed calm and polite and used an I-Message to tell me what he needed. This is something I stress with the students every year, so I guess it was good to see him put his knowledge to use!