Today I had one of those small, quiet teacher victories that nobody else would notice—but I’ll remember it all week. I was introducing the concept of ancient Mesopotamian religion to my 13-year-olds, and I could see their eyes glaze over within five minutes. “Polytheistic,” “ziggurats,” “anthropomorphic gods”—it was textbook soup, and I was losing them.
So I stopped mid-sentence and did something different. I erased the board and wrote one question:
“What would it be like if the weather had feelings?”
That woke them up.
Suddenly we were imagining a storm god having a tantrum, a sun god getting jealous of the moon, a river goddess needing gifts so she wouldn’t flood your crops. They laughed, but they got it. From there, we mapped out how the Mesopotamians might’ve seen the world—how nature’s chaos felt like emotion, and how praying to a sky god wasn’t silly if the sky itself seemed alive.
And that was the lesson. No worksheet needed.
It reminded me how powerful a simple, intuitive question can be. Not because it “covers content,” but because it bridges worlds—between ancient minds and theirs. Between a dusty chapter and real human experience.
I still handed out the vocabulary sheet at the end (I’m not that cool), but they saw the words differently now. “Polytheism” wasn’t a term—it was the world we’d just created together.
Sometimes I get lost in wanting my lessons to be impressive or clever or jam-packed. But today proved what I keep forgetting: kids don’t need fancy. They need real. They need why. And sometimes, “What if the weather had feelings?” is the most honest start you can give them.