Yes, I teach, but that is only one area of my interaction with these kids. I show up each day to an assortment of random and entertaining situations that never leave me wanting for amusement. Below, I have listed a few of the things that have come up, just in this week alone.
- 2 boys came to class completely covered in fiberglass, and spent almost the entire period picking tiny slivers of glass from their highly irritated skin. They said it was an auto-body project gone bad.
- I overheard an in-depth conversation where a kid was insisting that if everyone on the earth were to run really fast counter-clockwise, we could probably go back in time.
- I watched as a kid attempted to duck-tape his cell phone back together after it had been run over by a car.
- I spent a good part of 5 minutes convincing one boy that cutting out 25 mini-marijuana leaves to paste onto construction paper probably wasn't the best use of his time.
- A girl, tardy to class, attempted to ask me what she had missed; she was completely incoherent, and drooling as she talked. As she normally speaks quite well, it was a bit alarming. My concern must have showed because a friend piped up and told me she had just come back from the dentist, and was still numbed up.
- In the middle of quiet writing time, a boy farted, then proudly claimed it, stating, "Yes, it was me," which launched half the class to hysterical laughter, and the other half into a discussion on how farts get a bad rap (one argument was that they were a natural part of human functioning, so why not embrace it instead of being shamed by it?).
- A boy abashedly explained to me that he had shaved off his highly prized chops because his grandma had asked him to, but to keep that information on the down-low.
- I completely botched an attempt at a "high-five-fist-bump" greeting.
- I listened as 2 kids programmed their cell phones to say "You have a phone call" in 5 different languages. As they were moving on to more obscure languages like "Danish", I intervened, asking how this was relevant to their work. Their response: "Why are you so down on other languages, Campbell? Just because you're an English teacher doesn't mean you have to be racist." I responded with my infamous stink-eye, which set them to work right away.
- I discovered a huddle of chuckling students who confessed that they were busy sending repeated texts to a kid who had gone to the bathroom so that his phone would ring continually while he was in the stall.
- I confiscated a roll of masking tape that was being torn into strips, covered in statements such as "I eat kittens for breakfast" and "Hug me, and hug me lots", and then being discreetly taped onto a student's back.
- I distributed a band-aid after one student decided to answer the burning question of whether staples would penetrate flesh.
- I fielded questions on all of the following-and highly pertinent to education-topics: American Idol and whether I think it is kind-of lame that an Osmond tried out, what exactly is going wrong with my car and would I be willing to let a mechanically-inclined student take a look at the engine (I politely declined), how in the world am I able to type so fast, how I feel about Chuck Norris (I am completely against him; this launched a "defense of Chuck Norris" tirade, counter-launched by my list of all cheesy and stupid actors-Vin Diesel, Jean Claude Van Damme, Steven Seagal, Arnold Schwarzenegger, and that one dude in Sniper with the intense eyes), if there is a secret government agency made completely of lethal assassins and if so how does one apply, and if the new technology put up in the classroom was really a spying device that the administration was going to use against them in blackmailing schemes.
