“High schoolers and elementary schoolers really aren’t that different.”

Believe it or not, this one actually came from me.

I was sitting at the teacher table just this past Monday, working on some vocabulary words for our word wall while my mentor was grading papers.

One girl brought up her paper to be graded, and everywhere there was white space with no writing, she had completely colored the page in solid with her pencil.

While this really seems harmless, it actually makes the work a pain to grade because when your hand brushes over the page to grade, the pencil smears all over your hand, and oftentimes it can be hard to keep your hand from brushing the page.

A few days later, I was sitting in my AP Environmental Science class, and we were working on short answer response questions.

One of my friends finished early, but just decided to sit there with their paper. While they sat there, they began scribbling all over the blank spots of the paper.

In both the cases of the 3rd grader and the 12th grader, each had work they knew they had to complete after finishing the initial assignment. However, they both just sat there and colored.

Time wasted if you ask me.

While a lot of the time, I think it’s fair to refer to high schoolers and elementary schoolers as coming from ‘different planets,’ those ‘planets’ may not actually be too far away from one another. That’s just how it is.