Kids say the darndest things...
Younger kids tend to answer questions enthusiastically — often punctuating with a shout. A colleague, Gus, discovered this while tutoring Teresa, a second-grader who was gregarious during breaks but tensed like a guitar string while in session.
Teresa was taking summer intensive — four hours a day, one hour with four different tutors. She would get frustrated and take wild guesses, then scour our faces for hints of a correct response. Whether right or wrong, she proclaimed her answers loudly and decisively.
This day Gus was leading her through an exercise practicing changing consonant sounds in ai words — for example, paid to maid — and she was struggling mightily to substitute a p for an r and thus change rain to pain.
After a prompt from Gus, she was suddenly sure she had it.
"It's RAPE. RAPE," her high-pitched voice bellowed out the open door and down the hallway.
An ashen-faced Gus moved quickly to correct her. This time she got it right.
"PAIN. IT'S PAIN," Teresa shouted even louder.
The clinic directors raced down the hallway, trailed by peals of laughter from tutors in neighboring rooms. Fortunately, no parents were waiting in the lobby.