OOJ: High As An Elephant's Eye

i know nothing about nature. i came up on paved streets + malls- i can name maybe 3 kinds of trees (maple, fir, pine- wait is fir + pine the same thing? oh, birch! birch is a tree) but i can rattle off 50 chain clothing stores. i definitely didn't know sunflowers can grow to over 10 feet tall. i found these sunflowers in the school garden, which owes its existence to Mr. Goss, 4th-5th gr. special ed teacher, who spends his breaks teaching kids how to grow stuff. (he's also the one responsible for the Matilda sculptures from an earlier post). 

my south valley kids, who live in a world of fields + ditches (every story they tell me seems to involve a ditch- "we were down by the ditch when..."), know so much more than i do about the natural world. some of it is accurate. one kid showed me how to pluck sunflower seeds from the middle of the flower- you can eat them straight from the plant! it's weirdly wet. another kid scoffed at me when i referred to these as "giant sunflowers". he claims he's seen ones that are as tall as a house. 

here's another find from school. this one freaked me out a little. 

i still can't look at the photo for very long. the kids say it's a crayfish, but how in the world did it end up on a bone dry, rocky patch in an elementary school? don't these things live in water? it looks like a lobster, so it must live in water, right? but scorpions do too, kind of, but they live in desert. is it a scorpion?