One day, my class entered while I was listening to music. Specifically, I was listening to Stevie Wonder, so, predictably, the grade 7 boys told me that "this music sucks mister, you should listen to Guns n Roses and ACDC and Green Day and" etc. I told them that I do, in fact, have some Green Day on my computer, to which one of them began to guess which songs I have. "Do you have American Idiot?" "No." "Do you have Holiday?" "No."
And then came this gem:
"Do you have Basketball Case?"
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There's a school science fair coming up, and one day as I was wandering through the hall I encountered 2 of my grade 8's surrounded by a stack of papers, furiously working away on laptops. Wondering what they were doing in the hall during class, I approached and asked what was up. They told me they were working on their science fair project, which was studying the effect of listening to music on concentration. This involved having other students do short math tests while listening to different types of music. Straightforward enough.
Except that one of the types of music they mentioned was death metal, and the student who was finishing up as I approached was a cute little grade 4 girl. I found this hilarious.
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I need to tell you about S. He's a student in grade 8, and I think the best way to describe him is that he seems like he's high all the time, in a dazed, forgetful sort of way. It's not that he seems dumb - and he's not - he just seems like he's having one of those days. All the time. I'm not exaggerating when I say that he forgets his glasses at LEAST 50% of the time, and when this happens, he moves his desk to be about 3 feet in front of the board, so that I'm basically running into him when I try to teach. His notebook is incredibly disorganized, he's always finding stuff he thought he had lost 2 months ago, etc. etc. But somehow his disorganization isn't frustrating, just kind of hilarious.
Anyway, suffice it to say he's one of my more entertaining students. Never was this more evident than during our most recent test, when he inexplicably started dancing in his seat about 5 minutes into the test, and basically didn't stop for the whole hour and a half (sometimes out of his seat too). He kept raising his hand as if he had a test question, and then asked me if I liked his dancing. And then when he really did have a question, he sang it, and I had no idea what the hell he was talking about.
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I've started to really enjoy tests in this particular class. Not because I don't have to expend all kinds of energy explaining stuff and keeping the class focused (though I like that part too), but because both times we've had a test, I dunno, I just feel like we've really come together as a family! For example: during the first test, this annoying bird kept buhkawing or whatever sound it made, and we couldn't close the window because that was one of the days the school lost power. So I went over to the window and gave a curt "ssh!", which apparently worked. The class uniformly thought this was the funniest thing in the world, and was a welcome break in the 90 minute long test (that's a friggin' long test for grade 8s).
A similar thing happened during our recent test. I guess there's a virus going around, because a lot of people were sniffling, and about halfway through the test, the collective sniffling got so frequent that it prompted one non-sniffler to address the class out loud, begging with everyone else to shut up. Of course, this only made things worse, as a number of non-snifflers decided to join in to make it more of a thing. A low murmur began to permeate the room as the chorus of snifflers grew ever louder and sillier. Finally, the dam burst with its logical conclusion - a full-on sneeze, precisely timed to cause the class to erupt in raucous laughter the likes of which hadn't been heard since the bird incident.
It was bound to happen - it had to happen. The sneeze was the only way it could have gone. I had even considered throwing a sneeze out there myself. But it became obvious soon after, when the sneezer followed up with 2 or 3 more, that these were real sneezes. Maybe it was just a coincidence, or maybe the escalating Sounds of Sickness had triggered something. Whatever the cause, it was perfect. And hilarious.
And the sneezer? S, of course.
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