The French teacher needs a little more variety in her class decor, and I feel obliged to provide it.

The podium is kind of a monochromatic brown. I went for techno aluminum.

But then the holidays came along.

I went to the dollar store. I love the dollar store. I got these lovely items for her chairs.

AND an inflatable dinosaur. She hates inflatables.  I added green fairy wings.  Plus some rubber duckies and bunny rabbits, all conveniently out of her reach hanging from the ceiling.

The piece de resistance ( yes, I know I am missing acute/grave/circumflex accents) is this:

Now this is all a labor of love, but if you want to engage my services for your classroom, feel free to contact me.

This is a megaphone.

A student gives me a megaphone. As he hands it to me he says ” Don’t hit the siren.”

I’m thinking, ” What siren?”  as I hit the siren button.

The siren is fully twice the decibel level of the fire alarm system in the building. People start to pour out of their classrooms.

He unhits the siren button.

It has its uses.  Great for getting someone’s attention.

I was having a bad day, and to make myself feel better I decided to buy  the most obnoxious  ridiculous inflatable figure I could find.. NO, not THAT KIND. Although it could be kind of funny if…..never mind.   It was a toss up between the twin Santa flamingos  or  Sponge Bob Santa. Bob won.

Not that I wanted Bob for myself. No, this was for the French teacher that I routinely victimize to entertain myself.

The other French teacher with my depraved sense of humor helped.

Madame  Talking Through Your Nose was off at detention duty. We inflated Sponge Bob, tied him to her chair, then put her coat on top of him and tied the coat to Bob. From the back it looked like a six foot person was sitting in her chair. In the dark.

She came back and stood in the dark for a full three minutes trying to quietly sneak up on whoever was there.

She really really hates these things. Silly woman, why would you EVER let me know that?

I was showing pictures of Greek sculpture, which, generally speaking, isn’t big on clothing.

The freshman boys screamed a bit, yelling, ” why does he have his legs open?”

One boy raised his hand and asked quite seriously,

” If they worshiped the gods so much and thought they were so awesome and everything, why did they give them such tiny penises?

Went to a blogger conference yesterday.  One of the seminars was called  ” Mom, stop blogging about me!”.

I was suddenly struck by the fact that  an untapped fount of material has been here all the time.

My daughter introduced me to blogging.

No good deed goes unpunished.

I believe I hear screaming from many miles away.

Having too much time on my  hands, I decided to build an Eiffel tower for the French teacher.

I probably have no life, either.

Six feet high with blinking lights. And of course, mounted on a heavy concrete block so she can’t move it out of the room.  And with a squirrel on top. She LOVES squirrels. Send her some. Preferably live.

See, here’s a picture of it right next to her desk.

Oh. Sorry. Still in fantasy stage. And now she’s forewarned. Damn.

Maybe I’ll add water fountains and fireworks.

In mythology class: famous story of the Titan Cronus  eating his children, and then tricked by Zeus into regurgitating them ( evidently undigested).

Heard from the peanut gallery:

” I wish my dad would eat me and throw me back up.”

For those of you who have read this blog, you will know that tormenting my beautiful colleague, the French teacher, is one of the great joys in my life.  There was the pet squirrel fundraiser, hijacking her podium, invading her classroom and taking her prisoner, wrapping up four boxes and duct taping them to her desk with “its a small world after all” blaring from the smallest box, the brussel sprout glue gunned to a white board…I’m sure I’ve forgotten some.

She was in the high school this summer. I received an email. ” I was in your classroom. I left you something. Tell me when you find it.”

I hope its just a plastic Eiffel Tower.  But the message made my blood run cold. A plastic explosive?  Exploding squirrels?

Paybacks are a bitch.

translations are a perk of being a language teacher.  One of my favorites: from the Latin, which was essentially ” deer, with their branching antlers”  became

“ the leafy deer.”

in that same class, the Latin ” bolts of lightning  were hurled from the heavens at the ships on the sea”  became

“ bolts of flaming ships were hurled at the heavens.

the class drew pictures of their translations for a project. Leafy deer and  flaming ships in the heavens.