Piggles

By Anne Spencer

It was one of those delightful—read, rare—mornings when it looked as if lessons might run as planned. The children came in promptly at bell time, and there was only one quarrel about who had hit whom on the playground. There were no notes from home to say Johnny was going to Florida tomorrow and would I put together a week's worth of work for him. The most disruptive child in the class was away. Today was going to be special. I might even end the day experiencing that self-esteem that everyone is always talking about.

During math, we worked on fractions. There was a lot of discussion about pies and how much of one we would like if we had the good luck to be offered a piece. Robert and Billy settled their argument about the best kind of pie relatively amicably, and there was no need to keep them in at recess to talk about how to be better friends.

We moved on to our group work, studying the behavior of mealworms. The little creatures would be changing into beetles in a few weeks. The children had designed experiments to find out whether the worms liked dark, dry, or moist conditions. I was helping Jennifer observe her mealworm climbing an incline when there was a...