Are you smart?

I spend a lot of time defusing little arguments between kids.

One of the nasty little things that happens is an older child (or two, or three... usually boys) asking the smaller boys answers to math or spelling or some other stupid academic type questions.

Obviously most of the smaller kids haven't had enough experience in life/bullshit schoolwork to answer things like, "What's 8 times 6?"

We have one young man who's the typical insufferable know-it-all type. Jim really isn't a bad kid at all, but he has a little brother, and spends a great deal of time tearing his little brother down or trying to boss other kids around. I think he's just one of those kids who feels inferior to others and compensates for that by being sort of mean to them. I really don't think he *is* mean, I think it's an affectation. But I still need to intervene when he starts trying to prove how smart he is.

Last week, he was going to little groups of kids in the morning and asking, "Do you want to take the stupid test?"

Of course the unsuspecting child says yes.

Then Jim asked a series of questions.
"What color is the sky?"
"What color is the grass?"
"What color is an orange?"

Simple stuff. Then after six or seven questions, he'd ask the other kid, "What's the first question I asked you?"

The response was always, "What color is the sky?"

Then he'd laugh at the other kid and say, "Wow, you must be stupid! The first question I asked is if you want to take the stupid test!"

He wasn't being very nice about it, thinking that tricking another, younger child made him look really smart.

Instead of confronting him or castigating him, I said, "Hey Jim, how about doing a little math test for me to show how smart you are?" I said it in a friendly tone of voice. And it's not my goal to cut the kid down. But he was tricking the little guys and quite proud of it.

He stuck out his chest a little (since he's really smart, of course) and said yes.

I said, "So you're driving a bus. You stop at the first stop and three kids get on the bus. Then you go a few more blocks and eight kids get on. Then you go a little further and seven kids get on the bus. Then you stop at a stop where twenty kids get on!"

I could see him working hard to keep track of the numbers.

I continued. "You get to a school and 10 kids get off, but three more kids get on. Then you go to the other school and all the kids get off the bus. Now, how old is the bus driver?"

His jaw literally dropped.

"Uh... what?"

I smiled. "Tricked you, didn't I? That's pretty easy to do when the other person isn't prepared for it."

He was still looking flummoxed.

I said, "So you have no idea how old the bus driver is?"

"No!" he said. "You didn't tell me!"

"Ah, but I did. My first words were, 'So you're driving a bus.'"

He looked back at me, blinking through his glasses. Then, the light came on. "OHHHH!" he said, "I get it!!"

Then we laughed together a little bit. "I'm gonna try that on my teacher!" Jim told me. "And do you think your teacher will get a kick out of it? It's kind of like what you're doing with the little kids, Jim. Knowing you're going to fool someone is okay, if you're being nice about it. But laughing at someone because they don't understand the joke isn't very nice. Totally fine to try to fool people in fun, but not nice to laugh at them. I didn't laugh at you when you didn't know the age of the bus driver, I just explained what I'd done."

He looked thoughtful. I patted him on the shoulder. Told him, "Catch me next week, I have a couple more of these that can be fun."

So what I did was show him that one doesn't have to be mean with little word games. I don't know if the lesson will take or not, but I think my method is a little nicer than telling him that he's acting like a jerk.

He really is a good kid. Cute and funny and very serious about being a good student. He's a 'self-manager', a term and methodology that get my hackles up and turn me crabby, as I think it's a shitty thing to do to kids, but it's important in the microcosm of society you find in our local institutions of learning.

I just hope that I got him thinking about mental games and tricking smaller kids and acting insufferable. I hope he realizes that you don't have to be mean.

We'll see.

Disclaimer... ordinarily I write stuff ahead of time. And then I edit, read over it, edit some more and set it to post at 1 minute past midnight. Not sure why I picked that time of day. But I wanted to get something written because I've been lazy about it lately. So there has been no editing or proofreading and I didn't even read back over what I wrote.

Maybe I should have posted that as a warning at the beginning. :)