For the past year and a half, I’ve been lucky enough to intern at Sycamore School, the coolest private school this side of Meridian Street! I worked with first through fourth graders and got to know a lot about their ‘kid culture’. But for the first time since freshman year, I won’t be working there next semester. To cope with my departure, I’ve decided to share some of the wisdom I’ve learned while working with the smartest kids in Indy.
- No one is too cool for Craft Day. Even the boy who doesn’t want to enter the coloring contest, who you can persuade to if you say he can use the colors of his favorite football team, the Carolina Panthers. So what if everything he makes is blue and black?! He just has a very specific artistic vision.
- Kids love when you use the Gameshow Voice, for everything. For example: when explaining rules to games like Heads Up Seven Up or Eternal Tag, while announcing what snack is going to be, even while telling them they need to calm down if they want to keep free-time. Just hold a pencil up to your mouth like a microphone, try to sound like everything is extra-exciting, and Boom! Gameshow voice.
- Things that are ‘Cool with the Kids’ these days are: Minecraft, YouTube, Harry Potter, memes, and throwing water bottles on to tables so that they land standing up.
Things that are not ‘Cool with the Kids’ these days are: “old stuff,” including but not limited to, The Legend of Zelda, Mulan, and Cinderella; preferring white milk to chocolate; and not being able to get the water bottle to land standing up, no matter how many times you try. - While you may think being college-age means you’re young, you’ll learn it actually means you’re ancient. You’ll discover this when you can’t hang upside down from the jungle gym anymore, you don’t want to play dodgeball for an hour plus like all the second graders, and again, every single day when the kids tell you that you’re old.
- Working with kids means working with some of the kindest, funniest people you know. While it’s very hard to leave, I will never forget the memories and experiences I gained!
Paige Dempsey is a junior creative writing major at Butler University. She is from a tiny town in northern Indiana called Harlan, which is just outside of Fort Wayne. Paige loves art, books, and listening to the Hamilton soundtrack (at least three times a week).
