Do you remember doing really odd things when you were younger? Things that were actually a fair bit of work, didn’t serve any useful purpose, but were fun to do? When I was growing up we would spend lots of time building “forts”. Once this was a tree house that a few neighbor kids and I worked on. At school we constructed fairly elaborate buildings out of sticks and grass. At least once at school we turned the wood pile into a “hideout” (our school gym had a wood furnace, and the 8th grade boys were in charge of carrying in wood and lighting the fire every morning). One year when there was a lot of snow that stuck around forever we hollowed out chambers in it. Lots of kids working together to accomplish something of questionable worth.
On the farm it was usually building dams in the creek, and I got to pass my dam building skills onto my niece Brittney a few years ago. Luckily my little brothers were around to move the heavy rocks. Sam was the only one who could do that when we were young. Occasionally on the farm we would build hay forts in the barn.
This is not, however the sort of playing that I seem my students engaged in. Granted, I don’t see them that much when they have unstructured time that they need to structure. Maybe they don’t have enough unstructured time in general. So I was really interested when I saw them trying to freeze Lake Luther.
Lake Luther is a rather deep pothole in the school parking lot. It’s in a high traffic area for middle schoolers, so they see it often. There have been boats floating in it and once a little plaque appeared officially proclaiming it to be “Lake Luther”. It’s really not very big (maybe 14 inched by 20 inches), but surprisingly deep (about 5 inches). It’s in the drainage path for our parking lot, so it’s filled with water more often than you might expect.
A few days ago I found a pack of eight grade boys going back and forth between the edge of the parking lot and Lake Luther. The total distance was maybe 150 feet. On closer inspection it turned out that they were kicking chunks of ice from the edge of the parking lot to Lake Luther intending to freeze Lake Luther solid. Like large, industrial sized ants, they made trip after trip back and forth delivering ice in roughly 6×6 inch chunks. School rules prohibit picking up snow or ice, so they kicked it all the way. Besides, it was brrrr cold and they didn’t have gloves.
It warmed my heart to see them having such fun doing something so pointless that they decided to do “just because”. Did you guys do stuff like that when you were younger, or were we weird at Honey Creek?