Our Big Move: What the Heck?! Wednesdays: Dealing with Death

"What the Heck?! Wednesdays" focus on the heart-warming, ridiculous, and sometimes frustrating stories from our school days. Teaching in Turkey is trying and difficult. We come home exhausted, and our days off are nothing short of precious. That being said, we love our students. Most of the time. They are creative, silly, smart, obnoxious, loud, affectionate and adorable. And they make for some delightful stories. Enjoy...

I learned a long time ago that children deal with death differently than adults do. While I may be crying over the loss of a cherished pet, my preschoolers want to check out the corpse and see if it smells. When a catfish eats all of our baby frogs in one bite, and I prepare myself for mass hysteria, the child witnesses only ponder the catfish's enormous hunger, and if it might like some crackers. Perhaps for these young ones, death is simply a curious fact of life, not a heartbreaking loss.

Last week our coworker lost her grandfather. She rushed to Istanbul for the rest of the week to spend time mourning her family. And we MISSED her! I took this opportunity to teach some of the language we might use to express our condolences.

We did some brainstorming in second grade, and the children were actually able to come up with all of this stuff themselves (with some minor editing on my part). A lot of their ideas were phrases that they would use in Turkish, that they translated into English. Using their minds. (Man, they must have a great English teacher!) "We're waiting for you to come back," and "Come here please," are pretty direct translations.