Things teenagers say, and ask.

I have a grade 10 science class which is actually one of the most reasonable groups of people I've ever dealt with. (Mind you, there are people that show up once or twice a week, or others I haven't seen in a month despite calling their parents' house... and occasionally getting the ol' "caller ID says it's the school, so I'll pick up the phone and hang it right back up" treatment. Yes, that happens.)

The deal with a class is this: it takes a while to get to know them, and they take a while to get to know you. Depending on your comfort level with them, and with students in general, they may get to know you really well, or barely at all. As such, they'll be able to eventually gauge what sorts of questions they can ask about you... or so the theory goes.

(I kid, I kid. I'm friendly, but I'm not their friend. I'm professional, but I'm still a person. I try to be authentic, but at the same time I'm still have to keep some distance.)

At any rate, we had a little time to kill after a fun day of talking about light and then getting acquainted with some equipment we're going to be using for the next few weeks, by using prisms to make rainbows. I'm not entirely sure how the conversation turned this way, but it did:

"Hey sir, if you could take one teacher in the school out on a date, who would it be?"

And then it got weird.

First off, you'd better believe I didn't say a god damn thing in response to that question. And so then, there was a discussion, also not involving me -- kept mostly-appropriate, but with deviations into (further) ridiculousness -- about teachers sleeping with students. One of my (male) not-quite-rocket-scientists:

"Yo, if it's a guy teacher and a girl student, that ain't right. But if it's a girl teacher and a guy student... I don't know, man. I don't know."

But things swerved back to me, and the question I'd been posed. All I had for them was a piece of advice in the form of a single phrase that I would only say once, and I told them I wanted them to unpack the meaning of it:

"You don't shit where you eat."

Whadda ya know, they eventually figured it out.

We may not be doomed after all, folks.