"Any questions for Melanie?" Hands flew up all over the classroom. Melanie stood proudly next to her giant panda display board, eager to deflect the curiosity of her classmates.
Question time is my favorite part of a student's report, when they go off script and I discover how much they really learned about their topic. Or how creative they are in a pinch.
"How long do pandas stay alive?" someone called out.
"Um, they stay alive until a snow leopard or a wild dog eats them," she replied confidently.
"So...they can live as long as they want to?"
"Yeah. Until they die."
She answered questions about panda babies, where you buy bamboo to put on a board about pandas, and where pandas live. Just when I thought we were done, however, she pulled out her own question: "Do you want to know how to tell if one is a boy or a girl?"
I was tempted to redirect, but I was just too curious about how she would explain it. I WAS ready to intervene at any moment, however. "Well, how you know if a panda is a boy or a girl -because they look just the same on the outside- is you watch them. See, only a boy will walk up to a girl. So, if there are two pandas together, the one that's walking up to the other one is the boy. That's how you tell!"
This didn't fully satisfy my curiosity -do girl pandas simply go through life without meeting?- but the class thought it made perfect sense, and we moved on without any major violations of our innocence. Phew.
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