City living

The children at St. Martin de Porres Academy are the most stereotypical city kids you will ever meet. The only time they ever see nature or wildlife is when we take them on school-sponsored trips outside of New Haven, when they are appropriately fascinated by said phenomena. Last week, I accompanied a group of kids on a trip to a retreat center on the Long Island Sound and spent most of the day convincing 6th graders that a) the crickets weren't harbingers of the apocalypse, b) the seagulls weren't going to swoop down and eat them, and c) the seaweed wasn't going to come creeping out of the water and attack them.

Intrigued though the children may be by fishing nasty seaweed out of the Sound, their chief source of fascination seems to revolve around cattle. To encourage a college-bound culture (one of my school's maddeningly catchy catch-phrases), I have mounted a UW pennant above my desk. Invariably, the students who come into my office to work on applications are far more interested in the minutiae of my personal life than in their application questions, so "Ms. Saylor - you're from Wisconsin??" is a frequent avenue of distraction. Naturally, they all want to know if I spent my childhood communing with my bovine companions in the middle of a field, drinking milk straight from the udder. The answer I give all depends on how much crap the interrogating child has given me on the day in question.

Two bovine conversational gems for you, my neglected readers:

1) While in the middle of a where-do-you-want-to-go-to-high-school interview, a particularly ADD 8th grader interrupts my interrogation to ask: "Wait, you're from Swiss-consin? That's where all the swiss cheese comes from, right?"

Ohhhhhh boy.

2) While driving an 8th grade girl to her shadow day at a Catholic high school a 45-minute drive into the CT boonies, we pass a field of cattle. I am busy trying not to get lost, not to get into an accident in CT traffic, and not to accidentally swear in frustration that I don't even notice. My student, however, nearly leaps out of her seat in fascination and concern. "What's wrong with the cows, Ms. Saylor? Are they dead???" Confused, I ask her what leads her to believe that the cows have moved on from their earthly life. "They're all lying down, Ms. Saylor! Are the cows gonna be all right??"

Apparently I have come to Connecticut from Wisconsin, via New York City, to be a specialist on marine plant life and bovine behavior. Who knew that's where a degree in religious studies would get me?