Surprising Student Conversation

One of my advanced students and I were talking about topic sentences since I am teaching her to write essays.  Either it was boring or she just had this on her mind, but suddenly she started talking to me about the "freemasons" and how she had learned they planned to reduced the population on Earth from 6 billion people to 2 billion.  One way, she said she had read, that they were going to do this was by means of earthquakes . . . they had a machine that could start an earthquake and had already tested it on China.  (Remember the big earthquake in China in, what, 2008?)

I don't know if my mouth was hanging open as she went on, but it certainly felt like it.

This girl, 12 years old, is extremely bright, and she is essentially fluent in English.

If having a discussion about potential world domination by the freemasons is one way of improving her English, then I am not going to say no, but at the same time--wow!  All this really came out of thin air.  Topic sentences and my lesson plan kind of went out the window.

I ended up, hopefully gently, teaching her the term "conspiracy theory" as I showed her an internet article that "proved" that NASA faked the moon landing, and I talked to her about not believing everything she reads on the internet.

For our next class I intend to do some kind of "reality check" with her using the internet (it's nice that we have access to a computer and a large video screen in our classroom).

I've said it before, one of the reasons I like being a teacher is something new is always happening (but, OMG, a 12 year old Korean girl telling me the freemasons are going to kill 4 billion people by using an earthquake machine?  That I never, ever would have thought I'd hear.)