The Interesting, Quirky Kid

When you teach, you meet a wide variety of people.  The Breakfast Club divided high school students into the criminal, the athlete, the princess, the basketcase, and the brain.  Anyone who has been in a real high school knows that list is just the beginning.  It doesn't include the theater kid, the artist, the computer kid, the cheerleader, the marching band kid, the car enthusiast, the mimic (that's the kid who takes on the interest of the people around him).  I even went to school with a girl who red books and openly laughed out loud at them while sitting with other people at the lunch table. 

Of all the types, my favorite is the quirky kid.  She's the one who defies category.  He's the guy with an abnormal hobby.  When you ask them what they want to be when they grow up, their answer is likely a career that you didn't even know existed.  These are the most interesting kids in your class, and it will benefit you to get to know them.

My first year, I taught a young man who rode bulls on the weekends.  I obviously know that there are people who do this, but I had never thought about how they got started.  It was a dangerous hobby for a freshman, but I never got tired of hearing him talk about it because it was just so interesting.  Ten years ago, I asked a parent what interest her son had, and she said he wanted to be a naval architect.  I had to ask what that meant.  It's a person who designs ships.  After that, I noticed that he was drawing boats in my class all of the time.  I tried to work boats into whatever problem I could. 

There's a seventh-grade student in my school, who passes me every day at the door, making some kind of strange sound and/or walking in some unusual way.  She wants me to guess what kind of animal she is.  I don't know if this is just for me or if she does this with others, but it's a pretty fun game.  Thursday, she was a bird, and by Friday, she had become a horse.  It'll be strange if she continues doing this as an adult, but for right now, it's how she feels she can connect with the world.

By the way, if you can, allow them to incorporate their interest into your class, you should.  If you are a math or science teacher, perhaps you can include their quirky interests into problems you are working on in class.  For example, a problem could read, "A naval architect wants to find the volume of a boat . . ."  This not only signals the quirky student that you care about his interests, but it has the added benefit of opening up the world to the other students.  They probably don't know that job exists, and it may help them to know how many career options there are.  If you have projects that allow students to choose their own topics, encourage your quirky kids to choose something interesting.  You are going to have three presentations on the physics of sports, so how great is it when someone decides to talk about flying fish? 

The quirky kids make the most interesting adults.  Don't miss the opportunity to know them while you can.