Day 3 of ELL camp at 826LA East marked a Socratic high-point for the summer--that is, so far. Our very own Time Travel communications intern, Sam S., returned to Wednesday’s camp with the exclusive banana phone, convenient for placing all long-distance or long-time calls. Using the handy banana phone, ELL campers were able to make phone calls making it possible to reach as far back as Genghis Khan. Other notably chatty historical figures on the camper’s phone list were Isaac Newton, Christopher Columbus, and William Shakespeare. If you are curious to know what these chatty historical celebrities were saying, you can ask the campers--they took notes of the dialogue in their notebooks.

Later, the always pressing question here at 826LA put ELL campers to the podium and demanded, “Where should a weary time traveler settle, in the past or in the future?” Time Traveler historian and futurian interns, Cindy S. and Chris C., briefed the students on a few pros and cons they might encounter in the past or in the future. Here, campers learned that, along with a number of other flora and fauna, there may not be bananas in the future. All campers immediately embraced this as a good thing, yet proponents for the past or future were almost evenly divided. Each side had a rallying slogan. One pro-past camper proposed, “Without the past there is no future AND the past has all the good food,” to which like-minded campers cried the slogan, “Past, Past, We Have Vikings!” Not to be outdone, pro-future campers followed with their slogan, “Future, Future, No Bananas!” The pro-future side had an interesting rebuttal. “In the future,” they claimed, “you would be able to go to the past for your groceries!” Very interesting perspectives from both sides, indeed, but in this great debate we forgot to consider the fate of the banana phone in a future without bananas!