Life Skills

This afternoon, I not only substituted a high school Life Skills class, but babysat a three week old kitten, curled up in a box on the teacher's desk. Tiny, soft, gray, the kitten woke from sleep as I stroked its head and tried to look at me with cloudy blue eyes.

"It just learned how to purr," a student said. He smiled as I cupped the kitten in one hand and smoothed down its fur with my fingers.

Before she left to attend a meeting, his teacher explained how she came to have a kitten nestled in a cardboard shoebox on her desk. Two students (step-sisters) found the kitten in a field. Barely a day old and the size of a large mouse, its umbilical cord was still attached. They took it home and stayed up all night, watching it breathe, hoping it would live until morning. It did. Since their mother works and the girls attend high school, their teacher offered to babysit the kitten during the day. Every morning, they place the kitten inside a shoe box, which they gently put into a paper bag, and then smuggle onto the school bus. They use a different bag each day to divert suspicion. Their teacher nurses the kitten whenever it's hungry, takes it out in the grass a couple times a day to go to the bathroom, cleans it with a soft cloth, and keeps it warm with a heating pad.

The students watch her care for the tiny, helpless kitten. Now that's how you teach Life Skills.