Today was the 2nd session I had with my students, who I semi-affectionately refer to as 'my kids'.

Yes, I somehow sprouted 10 kids from nowhere.

Anyway, as I believe I have mentioned, they are nice kids, so they don't drive me up the wall or anything like that.

They've started chatting with me, other than the consulting me part of course. And as I've mentioned, because they're young and inexperienced, sometimes their focus is really all over the place. But they try and I appreciate that. I wish I had a better way of putting my ideas across to them though, because all these scientific technical terms have become part and parcel of my vocabulary so I can't help but use them when I'm talking about experiments and I'm pretty sure that they get pretty confused.

At least they're not hating me and they're pretty respectful kids. :)

I mean if you don't want some stranger who's really not your teacher poking about, you wouldn't ask that I drop by the next time. My opinions seem to matter a lot to them as well. It's not about me needing to feel important, in fact, I don't think I am, but it is strange how they seem to want to know what I think.

I want to help them as much as I possibly can, but if I do that, I might as well complete their project for them. So I spent my time answering their queries with.. even more questions.

For example:

Student: So should we use normal toothpaste or whitening toothpaste?
Me: What are you really out to investigate? The action of toothpaste when it's a toothpaste, or the action of the extra stuff in whitening toothpaste? You're testing the effectiveness of different approaches, so you need to be clear on what do you want to test in each approach.
Student: *looks worried*

Having nice kids to mentor means I'm relatively immune from those kids that horror stories are made of. Kids who try to peer up your skirt (I wore pants the last 2 times), harass you et cetera. The kids I work with are probably the best in the subject in the school and they're well behaved. As in excessively well-behaved, they almost remind me of me when I was in secondary school (read: teacher's pet). It almost doesn't feel like work when I'm working. Phew.