Try to Remember

I was talking up the teacher-for-a-day activity this morning, trying to encourage more kids to design a fun lesson and take over the class during the last couple weeks of school. In the past it's been a great way to end the year, novel, engaging, and very student-directed, but this year concurrent learning has put a bit of a damper on the project and fewer kids have stepped forward. So there I was, really pitching it, giving examples of past lessons. 

"There was a great one on bottle flipping!" I said. "I know that was a thing a while ago, but it was fun." 

 "A while ago?" said one kid incredulously. "Try five years!" 

 "Was it really that long ago?" I marveled. "Well, it doesn't seem like it to me!" 

 "Five years was a looooooong time ago!" he insisted. 

 "To you, sure," I conceded, "but to me? Not so much."

"How can time be different?" he scoffed.

"Think about it," I said. "I'm about five times your age." And there I paused, because that itself seemed impossible, even to me. Then I pressed on. "So, to me? Five years seems like one year seems to you." 

I thought it made perfect sense, and I had actually had a similar conversation with a student in the class before. She was contesting my suggestion that she add more information about her current life to her letter to her future self. "I think I'll remember everything about myself," she shrugged. "It's me! And it's only six years in the future."

Really?" I said. "Six years ago you were six. Do you remember everything about that?"

She swallowed and lowered her eyes. "No," she admitted. 

"That's all I'm saying," I told her. "Trust me: you'll appreciate the detail."

And I know that she will, because there are times when I read back over my own little time capsule that this blog has become and have no recollection either of the event I documented or the people I was writing about. In fact, in a few years, I'm sure I'll have no idea which kids these were.