The kids are so excited to get outside to do their sensory writing exercise today that I give them a bit of a momma-teacher lecture on sticking with me mentally for the directions. It almost makes me wish that we brought them outside so often that they were completely bored with the idea.

“Can we write about the dumpster?” says my posse of three boys. I agree under the condition that they don’t go in the dumpster, which they concede grudgingly; I leave them bending in half over the edges, flashing their boxers, writing on their clipboards and saying things like “Is that a RAT?”

Another boy approaches me. “Are these trees dead?” he asks, in the annoyed tone of seventh grade boys that indicates the presence of a genuine inquiry.

“See those buds?” I point out. “They look dead, but in a few weeks these trees will be covered in leaves.”

The next fifteen minutes are peppered with further wondrous questions:

“Can you smell mud?”

“I heard a train whistle. How could I hear that? There’s no tracks near here.”

“I licked a tree. It tastes like butter.”

“It does not.”

A swarm of students attempt to prove the tree-licker wrong. While I’m simultaneously laughing and hoping desperately that my principal is not looking out her office window, I hear the dull thud of a semi-inflated ball being kicked around. The posse has obeyed the letter of my law, but not the spirit.

“Can I keep this?” one of them shouts joyfully. He pops the dirty, half-dead tetherball into the air with his knee; I remember that the basketball coach has said that he drops baskets with total command. Then my Iraqi student takes over, and we have a demonstration of a different kind of grace. He’s told me that streetball and soccer helped his spirit survive as a refugee in Syria.

The class’ concentration is shot now, so we sneak back into the building along with the tetherball. As they add details to their sensory charts back at their desks, we talk about birdsong; I pull up a recording of a red-winged blackbird– they’re all over the marshy hollows that surround the school.

“OH,” several shout, “I’ve heard that.”

A student turns in his seat, sporting a demeaning arch of his eyebrow. He is an inveterate talker in my class, but he spends hours outside every day on his grandfather’s property. “Who HASN’T heard that??” he demands.

At the bell, as the kids file out, I stop Tetherball Boy. “I want a kick-butt poem about that ball,” I say.

“For extra credit?” he says eagerly, forgetting altogether about bragging to his friend within my earshot this morning about his stupidly low average.

“Done,” I tell him.

“All right,” he rejoices. He shoots off to his next class, laying plans with his buddies to paint the tetherball red and silver when they get home.