Making a Spectacle

My eyeglasses have been a topic of conversation more than once among the elementary school children I teach, whether it is the dark shades (which the younger children deem “cool”) or the bifocals with the defined lower lines (which they sympathetically think are cracked lenses). Yesterday, it was something else.

“What do you look like without glasses?” asked the second graders.

I pushed the frames up to the top of my head. What do you think?

“You look different.”

Everyone tells me that, I told them. Do I look more intelligent or less with them?

“Let’s see it again,” they said. “Put the glasses back on.”

I did as I was told.

“More intelligent—and older,” they concluded.

You see my dilemma, I said. Do I want to look smarter but older, or younger and less intelligent?

“Wear the glasses,” they said.