Just a Sliver

"Pie or ice cream?" I asked as a simple warm-up question in keeping with the season this morning. 

The question was also a throwback to 2006 when a colleague and I started our first online writing community. In those pre-social media days, we were not prepared for how popular the discussion threads would be. Nor did we expect the robust debates that our sixth graders would have over issues such as pie or ice cream. 

Kids were on our LMS discussion board almost 24 hours a day writing back and forth to each other. They used the basic introductions of themselves as sort of home pages, posting messages and updates as replies to the original assignment. We spent hours every week moderating thousands of posts. In retrospect, if we could have capitalized on the idea, it's not that farfetched to think we might be billionaires.

But today, I was not prepared for the stomping that pie got. "What are you? Eleven?" I finally asked when the tally was somewhere around 34-5 in favor of ice cream.

"Yes!" they roared.

From then on, I began to privately view the results as a maturity test; those who preferred pie were obviously more advanced than those who blindly gravitated toward the very simple pleasure of frozen dairy. 

Which I do not dislike-- to the contrary, I love ice cream!

It's just not

pie.