As my fellow educators will tell you, engaging with the next generation is the most rewarding part of the job. Nothing compares to inspiring (indoctrinating?) young, impressionable minds. Last week at work, however, I was met with a humbling reality: I encountered a child who reminds me deeply of myself, only to discover that she is, unfortunately, kind of weird and boring. 

At first, I admired the child’s chutzpah. She will make a great cult leader one day, I thought to myself as she coerced another second grader into trading their fruit snacks for her veggie straws. Start em young, I thought, psychological warfare will be a good skill.

As I continued to observe, though, I began to pick up on something peculiar. 

“I prefer to wake up with the rising sun,” she told a group of children who did not ask. I laughed, then stopped, afraid. There was a familiar cadence to her speech. A confidence unearned by feedback. A belief that what she was saying should be interesting, despite mounting evidence to the contrary. I decided to interrogate further.

“What’s your favorite holiday?” I asked her.

“The day the school supply lists come out,” she answered.

A chill down my spine. 

“What do you do for fun?” I pressed.

“I think about how I would optimize the classroom layout,” she said, glancing around with quiet disappointment. “There are inefficiencies.”

Oh god.

I sat down abruptly in a child-sized chair and stared into the abyss for what a coworker described as “too long, given the context.” The child, meanwhile, continued her day uninterrupted, gently correcting another student’s pronunciation of “library” and then apologizing in a tone that suggested she did not mean it.

Since the encounter, I have been forced to reconsider several of my beliefs, such as the assertions that I was “a pleasure to have in class” and “popular among my peers.”

The child, as far as I have observed, remains unbothered. I wish her the best of luck. 

She’ll need it.