jóven

The elementary school where I teach is a bilingual school, meaning the students study English for several hours a week and also study two subjects in English, in our case Science and Art. This means I'm a Science teacher several times a week for my second-graders, which I love.

We're studying plant life, and today I had them drawing a flower and labeling its different parts. They're all working quietly when Ainhoa, a sassy, too-smart-for-her-own-good type, beckons me to her desk. She asks me, "Teacher, why do I have to learn these things? If I need to know about a flower I can just look it up online."

I froze.

This kid was born in 2006. She's never known a world without Facebook, YouTube, Wikipedia, or Twitter. She learned to google when she learned to read. She was barely forming sentences when the first iPhone came out. For her, all the information in the world is, and always has been, readily available whenever she needed it.

And as she stared up at my with critical, demanding eyes, I had to admit she had a point. Why does she need to know about the reproductive organs of a rose? I forgot all that immediately after high school and have never suffered as a result. In fact, when we started this unit in the book, I had to refresh my memory on the various parts of a flower.

I googled it.

But of course, the flower isn't the point. It doesn't really matter that Ainhoa remembers where the stamen is, or what function the sepals perform. The point is that she starts developing an understanding of the world around her, hopefully igniting an interest and a curiosity that will lead her to an intellectually fulfilling life. I don't want to fill her head with the loose facts she might encounter in a Google search; I want to teach her how to examine things thoughtfully and critically.

I offered her a kid-friendly version of this explanation, and it sufficed to turn her back to her drawing, but I don't think she really bought it. Maybe someday when she's a biologist hard at work in her lab, she'll think back on this day and realize that I was right, but until then she's probably just going to WhatsApp her friends about what a pain in the ass her teacher is.

civil

It's a general rule on the Madrid metro (and on most public transport in the world, from what I've seen) that young, healthy people should give up their seats to people who need it more. Usually, when anyone over sixty gets on the train, a couple people jump up and offer their seat. On the more crowded lines at rush hour, however, getting a seat is such a miracle that people are hesitant to surrender it, regardless of the age or physical well-being of incoming passengers.

A few days ago I'm standing, squeezed shoulder to shoulder on a downtown-bound subway train when an elderly woman with a walker climbs onboard. She looks around hopefully at the lucky ones in the seats, all of whom appear suddenly to have very important things to do on their cell phones or in the bottoms of their purses.

A guy leaning against a wall offers this second-best position to the lady, and after helping her get secure enough to withstand the jerky stop-and-go motion, he turns on the sitters.

"Look at all of these shameless jerks, bowing their heads like they don't see her," he practically spits at the crowd, who are now addressing truly urgent iPhone crises and launching search expeditions in murky depths of their handbags. "It's disgusting, it really is. All a bunch of assholes. People these days have no manners. Fuck."

Thoroughly shamed, most of them choose to hold their ground at this point, apparently deciding that they'd come too far to turn back, but one guy (possibly because he doesn't have a smartphone to hide behind) stands up and, blushing, offers up his seat. The lady thanks him profusely, clearly a touch embarrassed by her uninvited knight in shining armor. Our hero, however, can only triumphantly mutter, "finally."