I’ve been working on a follow-up to my last post, about conflict resolution, and will hopefully have that up soon, but I’m struggling a little so it’s taking longer than I had intended.

In the meantime, I just wanted to write about a great moment my homeroom students and I had during our field trip to the Science Museum today.

We had just entered the natural history hall because my co-teacher, Bonnie, had said there was a dinosaur exhibit and we were all pumped for that. But first we discovered a room dedicated to the planets and stars so, obviously, we took a detour.

There was a section of the room that had cushions set up as recliners so that if you leaned all the way back, you could see stars spinning very fast and if you looked directly up, you would see simulations of galaxies colliding, among other things (I don’t know what the other things were because the descriptions were all written in Korean, which I haven’t mastered yet. They were still pretty gorgeous, though).

Julie and Sally soon rushed ahead to check out some trucks you could play on while pretending to ride across the wilder, more mountainous parts of Korea, but the rest of the kids hung back in the space room.

Now, I recently rediscovered a fascination with the planets and with other space that I had when I was very young but let go of years ago. So I was more than happy to hang out in that room. The kids and I sat on the cushions and leaned back to stare at these colliding galaxies and the moment was just…awesome.

I’m not sure exactly how to describe it. Every kid was really into it, but also so relaxed and thoughtful for just a minute.

“God, guys, isn’t that so beautiful? I could do this all day,” I said. I wasn’t even really expecting to get much of a response back because they were so absorbed. But right away I heard:

“Yeah, it is.”

“I love it, too.”

“I like this.”

“This is my favorite.”

“I love this. I want to go there someday.”

The last came from Michelle, which was great because she’s smart and a good student by conventional standards, but unlike some of the other students, I’ve never really heard her express that much of an interest in anything besides Disney princesses. Well, she was excited when we went to the zoo, but this was different, she was so earnest when she started talking about this.

Maybe it doesn’t sound like much, but it was for us (or maybe just for me). It’s so rare that we’re together, not in a classroom setting, where someone isn’t running around or yelling or off in their own world. This was something we all really loved and experienced together, something that for a second, we shared and it felt like we were all on the same level.

Maybe we all had the same awestruck but quiet feeling as we sat in that room. Whatever it was, it was one of those moments where you just kind of feel a bond between yourself and the people around you. Once in awhile, I’ll have something like that with the kids one-on-one but it was just nice for us all to sit there, totally on the same page, really enjoying something together. Overall, just a good Cherry Class bond.