Smatter

If it is anything, teaching is a chance to be around a smattering of smatterabilities. A sampling:

Often as I walk my class back from the cafeteria, I tap the shoulder of one student whose father died three years ago. Of course, since I’m in middle school, I tap her shoulder opposite me in hopes she’ll look the wrong direction to see who did it. She never once has looked in that wrong direction, however, and now she doesn’t even look. Instead, she asks me, “Do I need to call your mommy again? I have her number on speed dial.”

Back in the classroom and wholly unpredicted by (silly) me were some of the creative responses to the assigned spelling words from last week, which happened to precipitate these two sentences that more-attentive students might have giggled about before–or maybe after–writing:

Homework gaffs aside, however, I as usual have had to reach far into my bag of the bizarre to maintain student motivation. This week, my hot prize for responses to questions about Tom Sawyer, which I’m reading to all of my classes, was squirts of germ-x. I have a whole slew of little bottles of the stuff, courtesy of another teacher whose summertime employer Wal–Mart so generously donated them. “If you win, you get to sanitize your hands,” I told the class–and let me tell you, the grubby paws shot up.

And finally, I’ve gotten a kick this week out of my latest joke. With a sober look on my face, I tell students, “Unfortunately, due to bad weather [we’ve had no bad weather], school yesterday was canceled, and so the school board has decided to extend the school year two weeks further into summer. You might get out of school by July.”

Today I told that to another class I was supervising while their teacher was called away briefly, and one student looked at another with a look of appalled horror on her face. I heard her friend explaining that I had to have been joking since I’d said that we didn’t have school yesterday. “But we did have school yesterday, right?” she asked, still uncertain.

In situations like these it’s best that I turn away so that I don’t laugh directly in students’ faces; I don’t know how the rest of the conversation went.

But I was satisfied.