Young Genius

The common gingerbread man, shown below, is a docile creature, comparable to the Dodo bird in defensive instincts. Lately, I have been teaching my kindergarten students about this variety of gingerbread man, and also about the rare, but famous subspecies, "Running Gingerbread Man". There are few substantiated sightings of this species. In the most famous sighting, the specimen was destroyed in an unfortunate encounter with a fox. In order to increase my children's knowledge of this rare species, at the same time as introducing the ethical complexities of eating intelligent higher lifeforms, I chose to focus on a less well-known sighting. In this, more recent sighting, a family spotted the cookie, and rescued it from peckish pigs. The Gingerbread man was given a gingerbread house and enjoyed a more permanent position in human society than any cookie in the literature (I did not have the heart to tell my children the part of the story where the poor cookie was literally eaten out of house and home and consumed by hungry children). To solidify the learning, my children will be acting out this story in a play next month. I feel proud for my student's obvious talent (and not a little for my own teaching genius) to combine ecology, ethics, and drama, in a second language, at such an early age. They're really cute too. The children, from left to right, are: Hyung Lyul (Tony), SooYeon, EunJi (Candy), YeonSeo (Sunny) and HwangGang(Glory). I'm the tall one.