"I have a knife."

On the last day of school, I brought eight huge seedless watermelons to share with all my students and co-workers. How does that work? This:

Pampered Chef's Nylon Knife. Mine is pink.

is how you slice watermelon on a school campus. It's plastic, and you would have to try very, very hard to injure a person with it. I didn't let anyone else even touch it and kept it in closely guarded custody.

I didn't know whether to be amused or exasperated by the 7th-grader who insisted that I could not slice watermelon with a plastic knife, notwithstanding that I had already sliced up four or five that day before having that conversation with her. A lot of junior high kids struggle with the intersection of reality and their concept of it.