Before the schoolday started, Brianna and the rest of her class clustered around the ivysaur pen, watching as the pokemon inside slowly emerged from the dirt, the brightness of the protruding flowerbuds a shock after winter.
"Does this mean it's spring?" Jessica asked.
"I thought they weren't supposed to wake up until next week," said Becky.
They tore themselves away from the pen to run to the two chatting teachers overseeing the playground. "The ivysaur are awake!" Brianna shouted at them. "They're coming out of the ground!"
"Wow! That's so lucky and exciting that we get to have them so early! But don't bother them and let them come out on their own, okay?"
"Okay!" the kids shouted.
In class, Brianna was still humming with excitement. She kept going to the window to see the ivysaur had all made their way out of the dirt where the kids had helped bury them that fall for their winter nap. The biggest of the three was even starting to climb over the half-foot wood walls with a languid, half-asleep sort of determination. "I thought the ivysaur weren't supposed to come up until next week, though," she said to her teacher.
"Well," said her teacher, "I said that historically, they always emerged next week. That's been more or less true for the several hundred years of records. But in the past fifty years, that's started to reliably change! They've begun to wake up a little earlier, and they also flower a little earlier. Who has any guesses why this is?"
Julie raised her hand. "Is it because it's warmer? Is global warming real?"
"Yes! Studies like the ones our classroom did this year are evidence of climate change. The ivysaur wake up in response to temperature, so if the temperatures get warmer, they wake up earlier."
Brianna asked, "So we proved global warming is real? Are we going to call somebody?"
"Well," said her teacher again. "Well, there's been a lot of studies before this. But it's good to help scientists keep track of how fast the changes are happening, and that's what we're doing. We'll send in a form saying our three ivysaur all woke up today, and so will schools all over the country."
"And then what?"
"Then it'll get collected for the scientists to use! So we're all being citizen scientists by helping with this. Isn't that exciting? And we'll make a big graph to put on the wall with the data from our school's past years and add this one to it."
Brianna started to say, "And then what?" again. Then she stopped. She looked at the ivysaur again, and then she went back to her seat.
TCG, Southern Islands: A sure sign spring is on its way is when the seed on this Pokémon's back flowers.
Anyway, did you know depression and anxiety have been rising each year in young kids?