Category Archives: humor, classroom humor, childhood, school,

the happy little cow

Mostly what I remember about my high school years  was that I didn’t have the faintest idea what was going on in class. No idea in algebra, which I believe I had three times, no clue in earth science.  I was marginally more clued in Mechanical Drawing, and I did know what was going on English class. This is what I remember from Freshman English.

I was chewing gum. The boy next to me was my next door neighbor. He had hardly spoken to me since we were best friends at the age of 5 and sailed  leaf boats in the gutter together. The English teacher was talking about Pippi Longstocking.  She caught my jaw moving.

“ You spit that gum out. You’re over there chewing  your cud like a happy little cow.”

David (my neighbor)  looked at me completely deadpan.  “Are you a happy little cow? Are you really a happy little cow?”   His first words to me since we were five. The last  until our twentieth reunion.

I have taught all my classes how to say laeta parva vacca sum.    I am a happy little cow. It commemorates that moment in English.

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walk through the underworld

Our induction ceremony (we can’t say initiation. ) was a symbolic trip through the underworld, beginning with a barefoot walk in the river Styx, a pan full of ice cubes and marshmallows.

There is an association manual with suggestions for the ceremony, including handing  the initiate ( oops, inductee) the eye of the Cyclops. A troublemaker mother organized the event.  Same mom who provided the blue eyeshadow.

What blue eyeshadow? Go back and read all the older posts right now or you’ll have them for breakfast.

“I wasn’t sure where I could get enough eyeballs for everyone, but I thought about a wholesale butcher shop”

Her son commented,“ Yeah, but when they take off the blindfold and see what they have in their hands they’ll freak out and throw it”

Me: “Wait a minute. Aren’t these like, Halloween candy gum eyeballs? We’re using REAL EYEBALLS?”

“Well, “  she said, “the manual  says eyeballs, and I’m not sure I can get enough. They must have sheep or cow eyeballs at a butcher shop”

I envisioned students screaming and hurling real eyeballs into my classroom walls and then the slime not being totally cleaned up.

( It sure wasn’t going to be me cleaning them up. Suppose they watched you while you scraped them off?) The eventual smell of rotting eyeballs….I couldn’t even look at a disembodied eyeball, much less go buy a bag of them and use them to torment adolescents.

I love this woman.

But we used plastic.

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The unexpected visit

The supervisor appeared in my room one day half way through the lesson.

He sat himself at my desk. I continued the lesson and handed him the textbook, open to the translation.   He motioned me over.  The classroom was originally a room for small study groups. It was very small, designed for only ten people.

He pointed to the textbook.

“Where is the teachers edition?” he asked rather loudly

“I don’t have one.”

“Why not?”  in a somewhat argumentative tone.

I didn’t know why not. I had never had a teacher’s edition of any book. No one had ever given me a catalog to order books. I just used what was there.

“ I never ordered one. I don’t even know if they have them for this book.”

He pointed to the story written in Latin.

“ Well, then,how do you know what this says?”

Pause.  Really long pause.

“Ummmm…because….. I’m the Latin teacher?”

He knew.  I was just making it up as I went along.

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The boss man

One year I helped break in a man new to his job as supervisor.   He took his job very seriously. His job description and duties read:

“ Assume all instructional personnel are in dire need of correction and supervision.  Show them the error of their ways using a patronizing tone of voice and body  language. Attempt to communicate via telepathy that you regard them as marginally more intelligent than heifers. (the staff is female) You may push them to the limit without fear of mass resignations because your district pays more money than any other within driving distance.”

Ok, I may have exaggerated a bit.

He entered my classroom one day in the middle of a lesson. Courtesy to a tenured teacher usually manifests itself by a little warning of the impending visit, but our guy was out to catch us in the act of incompetence by springing his leopard like self on us in alarming appearances. He stated  that he was justified in doing this because I was not tenured, even though I had documentation by the administration that stated otherwise.

We had this conversation in the hall one day.

“I have to observe all untenured teachers three times”  he told me.

“I’m tenured. I’ve been here five years.”

“No, because you’re part time it takes you six years.’

“Well, I have this paperwork here, and a contract, and right here it says tenured teacher. And in this correspondence between the union and the superintendent, it says here tenured teacher.”

 “No, I checked with the secretary at the board office. “

I was glad to hear that the secretary at the board office knew more than the president of the union and the superintendent. Obviously she was taking that class in school law that the two others had missed. Finally, I sicced the union president on him. I never saw the value in unions until I became a teacher. And now I’m a believer.

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Zeus is the best god

Every day I present a person from mythology.  Mythology is chock full of rape, incest, adultery, cannibalism, mutilation, betrayal,… you get the idea.  After awhile I started to think,

“ How can  I teach this stuff to kids? “  and then I would listen to a rap song.  Straightened my thinking right out.

Zeus has a lot of women, goddesses, nymphs, mortals, willing or unwilling. He is the MAN,to the hormone filled skins of teenage boys.  I assigned presentations on the Greek gods. A big red haired freckled boy got up.

“Zeus is the BEST god.”

He thought for a moment. His catholic upbringing kicked in.

“Except for Jesus.”

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The apology

I used to teach French to kindergarten through 4th grade. None of them knew my name, I was just The French Lady. This was my teaching technique:

“You guys won’t remember anything I teach you. ”

“Oh yeah? We will so!”

“Nope, you won’t. I’ll prove it to you.  If you remember these four words, you get a point. If you forget them, I get a point.”      Then I made the scoreboard.

me you guys scoreThis generally put them into a feeding frenzy. If any classmate had dared to forget a word they would have lynched him.  Every point I got took up the whole board. I made their  points  tiny dots on the board. If they started to win, I would say,

“You know, I really hate kids.”

“Oh yeah? Then why are you here teaching kids? You don’t hate us. You LOVE us!”

I first heard my dad say this to my daughter when she was four years old, and I was appalled.

“Why should I give you lunch? I don’t even like you.”    She didn’t even bother to look up from her book.

” Yes you do Pop Pop. You love  me lots and lots.”

So I tried it.  The kids don’t believe me either.

One day a first grade class got very rowdy.( I’m sure I had nothing to do with that at all)  The teacher was mortified and made every child make me a card with an apology.  One card said this:

im sorry but thas all

Thas  it.  Thas all I’m getting.

Ten years later a student stayed after class to talk to me and mentioned where she had gone to grammar school. It was where I taught ten years ago. And then it hit me. “Did you have really blonde hair and a ponytail?”

It was her.  And I still had the card.  Which I of course brought to class and told this story to her mortification every chance I got.

THAS ALL FOLKS.

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the duck caper

One day a French teacher decided to kidnap the German  class mascot, a tiger striped wooden yellow and black  duck. Yes, I was wondering the same thing.  Who knows?  German, its like a cult. They don’t need a reason.

Anyway, a substitute teacher told us  the duck  was  in French class. So at the end of the day, my kids trooped down to her class with a diversion, leftover cake, and in the confusion we snatched the duck and ran like hell.

Now, the duck isn’t little. At least four feet long.

tiger striped wooden duck with roman helmetWe sent a picture of the duck to the Germans with a message:  ” We have the duck. Send ten thousand deuche marks.” Yes, the duck is wearing a Roman helmet.

We then hid the duck as carefully as one can hide a four foot tiger striped duck in a classroom. We then sent another photo of us all gloating over the duck.

The substitute teacher, in a moment of sadistic glee, did not tell the French teacher who stole the duck. The French teacher walked around frantically, no doubt  muttering      “Oh, merde! He’s going to  kill me!”  meaning, no doubt, the German teacher.

While I was out of my class for ONE period, SOMEONE came in, found the duck and absconded with it.

The Spanish teachers all acted totally innocent, like they hadn’t seen anyone running out of my room and down the hall with a four foot tiger striped duck in tow. Right.  Channel 6 news would have shown up for a shot of  people running down a hall with a contraband duck.

This incident clarified for me a glaring lacuna among my possessions. I do not have the equivalent of  the duck. So I set my students to making a Trojan Horse.  And its bigger and taller than the duck.  The problem was at the end of the year when I had to do something with the horse.  My husband looked at the horse and said, ” Just what are we going to do with that?

horse looking out windowHe looks out the window, waiting for the day he does battle with the duck.

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more memories from a juvenile delinquent

Back in the day ( what does that mean, anyway? ten years ago? five hundred ? my childhood?)  everyone had to buy their own padlock for their lockers, they weren’t  built into the locker like they are nowadays.

We  (me and  my partner in crime, Scuz )hatched a new plan. We casually stood around and talked to our friends while they were unlocking their lockers and memorized the combinations. We got about ten locker combinations.

We came in really early and switched them. Some of them we put on backwards so that the numbers were facing the locker. You would have to get down on your knees and try to lift the lock up to see the combination and then it still  wouldn’t open.  We also selected people who all didn’t know each other.

And this time, as a protective measure, we selected people that didn’t know me or didn’t know Scuz, so we would not be targeted as the obvious perpetrators.

This one was a victory. We were never suspected.

Well, we were never accused, anyway.

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the school sleepover

One night Scuz and I  decided to spend the night in the high school.  Another venture for which we would no doubt be arrested nowadays. Scuz  has carefully hidden her checkered past from her three sons, whereas I have entertained my daughter with stories of my questionable character for years.

We hid in the auditorium at first, on the stage under the grand piano.  We brought submarine sandwiches which we unwrapped and began to eat while we waited for everyone to leave the building.  And then… Drama Club!   They came in to rehearse!  We had never thought about that.  There we were, under the piano, and suddenly the smell of the ham and cheese and olive oil was so strong we were sure people could smell our subs two blocks away. We would surely be discovered.  But we weren’t.  After at least an hour of quietly chewing and crouching under the piano the Drama Club left.  We got up and stretched and as we ventured out from behind the curtains we had another rude shock.  The janitorial staff!  The building was crawling with custodians! Something else we hadn’t thought about.

As I think back, I wonder. Did we ever think about ANYTHING? 

Scuz stepped behind a stage curtain just before a custodian walked in. Her black high topped converse  sneakers stuck out from behind the curtain.  How could they not spot her?  But they didn’t notice.  We  snuck out and tried to get in a classroom.  It was locked. And so was the next. And the next.  They were all locked! Why?  Why would anyone try to get in a classroom if they didn’t have to?  We had figured we would steal hall passes and look up people’s grades. Possibly  leave a souvenier in a desk.

When we were in 8th grade, Scuz  found a baby frog that had been run over by cars about a thousand times and had flattened out till it was like a piece of cardboard. She held it up to her lapel.

“You think it would make a nice pin?”

After 8th grade graduation  we snuck in the classroom of a particularly deserving teacher and left it in her desk.  I would hope that an entire summer  in a hot desk would have done wonders for its odor, but the guts had been squished out of it pretty thoroughly.

Anyway, the high school sleep over caper was pretty much a wash out after we climbed up the clock tower and found a box of food to be used in case of air raids.  We had done the old,

“I’m spending the night at her house, she’s spending the night at my house,”

routine with our parents. Now we had the dilemma of  how to get back in our houses at eleven pm.  We told our mothers we had a fight.

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bippity boppity boo

For years my classes have acted out fairy tales in a foreign language. I write fractured fairy tales myself. The evil queen lives with a wolf who admires himself in a talking mirror and four blind dwarves live in the forest with the seven bears. I am thinking next of three blind evil queens. How do I fit in Cinderella? Cinderella turns into a pumpkin? Then what? The prince makes her into a pie?  And why do all the boys always want to be the princess? Doesn’t matter what age. The schools are rife with closet drag queens. The happiness that a one dollar cardboard crown brings.

The dollar store had a plastic yellow magic wand. It makes this sparkly  noise like the  wands in cartoons. It is noise activated and sometimes I can’t shut it up. Hid it in my drawer and you could still hear its energetic twinkling. One day I went across the hall and knocked at another  teacher’s door. He answered it looking concerned.

“ Is everything ok?”

I handed him the wand.

“ Hold this. I’ll be right back.”

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