While teaching a class of 12 year olds, one student asked about the origins of life.
[For the record, she was supposed to be conjugating the present tense of avoir]
“Can you narrow it down a bit for me?”
“Well, something had to start something so what started everything?” Lucy wondered.
“It’s a kind of Chicken & Egg Theory question, that one.”
“What do you mean, sir?” she persisted.
“Whenever we contemplate the origin of anything we often ask Which came first: the chicken or the egg? Some questions we just can’t answer. Well, not yet anyway but I think we’re getting closer.”
Lucy stared at nothing in particular but I could see her wheels were turning.
“And now I’ve confused you,” I laughed.
“Only because you’re confused, sir,” she stated, as respectfully as possible. “The answer to the Chicken & Egg Theory is easy. Chickens are birds. Birds are descendants of dinosaurs. Dinosaurs didn’t give birth to live young but laid eggs, therefore the eggs some dinosaurs laid eventually evolved into chickens through a process called speciation.“
Wow.
A colleague once told me, “The best thing about being a teacher is that we are, indeed, the smartest people in the room.”
Some days I’m not so sure.
Mr Ormsby At Large 