Shuttle to San Anselmo, Memoirs of a bus driver
/Have you ever thought about how interesting it must be to be a taxi driver. Well, I’ve had the opportunity this year! And even though my passengers aren’t perfect strangers in the big city, I’ve had some interesting conversations! I’ve come to the conclusion, while shuttling students from school to San Anselmo every day, that Chronos Academy students are intelligent, quirky and fascinating people.
They make up the most creative car games! We have a mini Simon game students play & pass, and they have collaboratively played for 10 minutes without a mistake! One student is a professional “Quiet Game” competitor, and another stumps us with very obscure colors in “I Spy with My Little Eye.” One guy made up a variant on the License Plate game by researching the system the DMV uses for assigning numbers. He discovered that, if a license plate number on a car starts with 9, it’s very new. 8 is very common because those cars are a few years old, so 1 is very rare. He offers 1000 points to any student who spots a standard issue license plate on a car (not a truck, not a vanity plate) that starts with number 1. They have been looking all year!
The kids often request our history audio textbook on the ride. Each chapter in Story of the World is a riveting narrative of the time & place we are studying. They love to review & preview other chapters from the year. At times, when we arrive at the pick up spot, parents patiently wait for them to finish the last minute of the story!
They like to listen to our history songs too or sing them themselves. Once a student sang the 17 minute timeline from memory during the entire drive! They Might Be Giants Science is Real is also a favorite in the van. But the conversations are the most intriguing for me!
One student has a particular propensity for mathematics. I am thoroughly amazed at the number of hours he spends researching math for fun or testing his own mathematical hypotheses and making up his own formulas! I can play along…at least through the level of AP Calc AB, typically a 12th grade subject. But he stumps me daily with tid bits such as the exact radical expression of cosine of 15 degrees. So I stump him back. “What’s arc sin of -3𝛑/4 + arc cot 7𝛑/6?” He groans & reluctantly solves my problem! We have so much fun geeking out.
Of course there are occasional conflicts in the van, and the ride is an opportune time to coach kids in how to empathize with others to better navigate difficult relationships. And with a captive audience, I have incredible opportunities to encourage students to be the best they can be. For some reason, they open up on the drive. Whoever sits in front tells me what they have been thinking about all day—their weekend plans, new pet, a conflict with a friend or what they baked the night before. One girl, who usually reads silently when riding with classmates, opens up when riding alone. She tells me all about how she adopted her beloved Dalmatian, which graphic novels she is re-reading, and her plans of traveling to Australia. She knows every endangered animal species in Australia and perhaps the rest of the world. It’s very impressive. Having “voice” with kids is such a privilege and such a responsibility; I dare not take it lightly. If I share from my experience the lessons I’ve learned, listen empathetically to their process, and spur them on with encouragement and thoughtful questions, we will all make it home from school safely and become a little bit better from the ride.