Learn Me Gooder

Learn Me Gooder - By John Pearson



Introduction



When I first published Learn Me Good, I had no idea how successful it would be. Sure, in my daydreams, it would become an international bestseller, I’d receive multiple invitations to appear on Oprah’s show, and every house would have 2 copies (one for each bathroom). Realistically, though, I figured most of my friends and family would feel obligated to buy a copy, and anything beyond that would be gravy.

Instead, I was shocked – pleasantly so, not hit with a taser – at how many people genuinely embraced Learn Me Good, recommended it to friends and colleagues, and even clamored for a sequel. Many of these readers discovered LMG through the rise of e-readers, most notably the Kindle, to which I may owe my first-born child.

I actually started working on this sequel, Learn Me Gooder, back in 2006, right after LMG came out. I worked on it a little bit here, a little bit there, yet something always sidetracked me. School, television, then a girlfriend who became a fiancée who turned into a wife.

Finally, I buckled down and got serious in August of 2010. I figured if the world really IS going to end in 2012, and that Mayan prophecy isn’t just some time-traveler’s idea of a practical joke, I ought to have at least one more grammatically incorrect title out and available.

While I’m on the subject of the title, I knew pretty early on that I was going to go with Learn Me Gooder. Still, that didn’t stop me from considering a few Hollywood-inspired sequel subtitles. Here’s a small sampling of the list I came up with:



Learn Me Good 2: Academic Boogaloo

Learn Me Good 2: Marvin’s Revenge

Learn Me Good 2: Learn Harder

Learn Me Good 2: The Temple of Gloom

Learn Me Good 2: A Fistful of Dawdlers

Learn Me Good 2: The Fellowship of the Bling

Learn Me Good 2: The Engineer Strikes Back

Learn Me Good 2: The Math of Khan



In the end, I decided simpler was better, and Learn Me Gooder was my final answer.

Just like the first time around, Learn Me Gooder is mostly based on real experiences, but they have been embellished, fictionalized, and condensed into a single school year. All of the names have once again been changed to protect the innocent, the red-handed, and the apathetic.

Six years have passed since the events of Learn Me Good, and Jack Woodson is still sharing stories and insights through emails with his friend and former colleague Fred Bommerson, who works at Heat Pumps Unlimited, Jack’s old employer. Much like the recurring Death Star, the TAKS, or Texas Assessment of Knowledge and Skills, still looms over Jack’s head.

One more time, I feel the need to stress that this book is a work of fiction. A few of the Amazon reviews for Learn Me Good took ME to task for the acts of Mr. Woodson. One review even began – “Appalling treatment of endangered children!”

I would ask everyone reading this to keep in mind that certain stories have been altered, supplemented, or even completely made up, and that I myself did not actually do every single thing that Jack Woodson does in the book. For instance, on page 98, where Mr. Woodson throws lemon meringue pies at the kids every time they tell him there are 365 days in a week – I never actually did that in my class.

In a similar vein, my wife, upon whom the character “Jill” is based, insisted that I state that there was not nearly so much drama during our actual courtship. Lucky for me.

Finally, I want to send big thanks out to several people. To my family and friends for helping me through this writing process and for being so supportive. To my friend and col-league Michael J. Ruiz for his contribution of the sign-off name used on the October 12 email. To Xavier Rodriguez for the use of his classroom and black board which appear on the cover, to Shawn Fernandez for taking the pictures, and to my nephew Ethan for joining me as a cover model. To Carley Barnes for cover concept ideas, and to Terry Roy for finalizing those cover ideas.

Thanks for reading, and enjoy the story!



John Pearson



July, 2011



Date: Monday, August 24, 2009





To: Fred Bommerson



From: Jack Woodson



Subject: Here we go again





Fred! My man!



Long time no talk, buddy! Wait, I talked to you on Saturday, right? But it’s been a long time since I emailed you from my classroom! What’s that you say – I’ve NEVER emailed you from my classroom? That’s because the portable classrooms outside didn’t have Internet access, but this year – wait for it – I’m inside the main building, baby!

I’m very pleased to report that the third grade will no longer be treated like steerage on the Titanic! No more sloshing through puddles when it rains just to get to the cafeteria. No more braving the freezing cold in February during restroom breaks. No more families of raccoons living (and sometimes dying) underneath the classroom floor.

Being inside will be fantastic. But I have so much more to talk about than just the new digs. Today was the first day of the brand new school year, and it’s amazing how I still get the first-day jitters, even with seven years of experience under my belt. I got into bed at ten o’clock last night, but I know I didn’t fall asleep before two. When I DID sleep, I had dreams where I was in class but couldn’t talk. When I opened my mouth, all that came out was a bleating trumpet sound, a la Charlie Brown’s generic adult. Not a very restful night, but I was up and at the school at seven anyway, ready and raring to go.

My morning started in the moshpit of our gymnasium, where all of the students and most of their parents had been packed in like sardines, waiting for the teachers to pick up their classes. I waded in to the gym, and it occurred to me that I must not be doing things right as a teacher because every year, they send me brand new kids and tell me to start over!

As I made my way through the maddening crowd, one lady stopped me and asked, “Excuse me, are you Mr. Woodson? Do you have Lakeisha Jefferson in your class?”

I consulted my class roster, and sure enough, there she was. Upon hearing the news, Ms. Jefferson seemed pleased that I would be teaching her daughter. A little TOO pleased. After witnessing a lengthy victory dance and the fourth violent hip thrust, I was starting to feel slightly uncomfortable with just HOW pleased she seemed to be.

She explained, “Lakeisha can be a handful sometimes, but I think she’ll behave better for a male teacher.”

Oh, joy! That’s a theory I can’t WAIT to test!

Once I had rounded up my students and taken them to my classroom, I was able to observe a few of the other kids. I have a boy named Jacob who is only 7 years old. Typically, third graders begin the year at age 8 and turn 9 at some point. Sure, we get our fair share of retainees who turn 10 (or, in one or two instances, 11) years old in the third grade. And I’m not even counting Alhambra, who turned 16, because he was clearly at the wrong school. But Jacob will only TURN 8 this year! He’s a baby among babies! He does seem relatively bright, though.

On the other end of the spectrum, we have Nestor (already 9 years old), who can barely read or write. He already has me extremely worried.

This morning, I started the kids off with the usual first day activities – partial differential equations. Just kidding, they were doing the simple little “tell me about yourself” worksheets. Favorite color, favorite movies, names of family members, etc. I noticed Nestor following a pattern. He would ask his neighbor, “What does this say?” Then he would scribble something on his paper. “What does this say?” Scribble.



I wandered over and glanced at his paper. On every line, he had written the same thing, which was not even a real word.



“What is your favorite book?”

“OGO”

“How many brothers and sisters do you have?”

“OGO”

“What is your best friend’s name?”

“OGO”



Clearly, I was not going to glean any personal information from Nestor’s entrance questionnaire. So I decided to use an alternate assessment to gauge his number sense. I gave him a blank sheet of paper and asked him to write down the numbers in order, as high as he could count. I watched as he wrote 1, 2, and 3, then I walked away to see how some of the other kids were doing. After about three minutes, Nestor raised his hand and motioned me over.

He asked, “What comes after R?”

At that moment, I experienced an ice cream headache without having actually consumed any ice cream.

As you can see, I’ve got my work cut out for me here. Nestor’s counting woes already make me think back to Hernando from a few years ago, who ALWAYS thought “catorce” came next when counting. Whenever we had a little free time, we would break out the counting cubes and practice in his native language.

“Uno, dos, tres. . . What comes next, Hernando?”

“Catorce?”

It’s possible that Bono of U2 was hanging around my portable that year and used Hernando as an inspiration for the opening to “Vertigo,” but somehow I doubt it.

There are two girls named Anna in my homeroom this year. They’re quite easy to tell apart, though. One of them is super short, and the other has an unusually deep, raspy voice. Both seem intelligent and well behaved, so I’m pleased to have both “Tiny Anna” and “Smoker Anna” in my class.

My afternoon class started the day in Mrs. Bird’s classroom (she’s my partner this year). One of her introductory activities was having the kids write their answer to the question, “How did you spend your summer?”

I looked at a random paper this afternoon, from a little girl named Betsy, and I was pleased to see that it started with, “It was fun, we went to Six Flags and Cici’s Pizza, and I got a new puppy.”

That’s so much better than if it had said, “My dad got caught trying to smuggle illegal fighting llamas into the country, so we visited him every Thursday from two to four at the Brownsville County Lockup. Also, my new puppy smells like paint thinner.”

Another girl in Mrs. Bird’s homeroom already feels comfortable enough to use a nickname in class. Her name is Gwenn, but on her papers, she wrote “Priti Prinses.” I’m assuming she means Pretty Princess. I’m also assuming that’s a self-appointed nickname.

Well hey, I think the custodians want me out of here now, so I’m going to go home and find something to eat. Say hey to the gang there at Heat Pumps Unlimited for me. Let them know that my days of sleeping till noon are over.

At least until Saturday.

Talk to you later,



Newt B Ginnings



Date: Wednesday, August 26, 2009





To: Fred Bommerson



From: Jack Woodson



Subject: The leg bone’s connected to the… elbow?



Hey Fred,



I find it oddly kind of sweet that Larry has been looking forward to my first message, but that still doesn’t give him the right to open your email when you’re not around. Even if he IS your supervisor now. And I STILL don’t understand how that happened.

But hey, him being a bonehead transitions nicely into my first story today.

As part of the first lesson in science class, we’ve begun to explore different examples of systems. Today, we took a look at the human skeleton. The kids partnered up, and I gave each pair a skeleton puzzle. There were about twenty pieces to each skeleton, some representing individual bones and some depicting sets of bones like the ribcage. The kids used brads to connect the bones through holes in each piece.

Let me tell you, my kids have some VERY convoluted ideas about how their bodies are put together.

One group immediately tried to fasten the pelvis to the base of the skull. Every group in my afternoon class thought that the arm only had one bone, so they had the hand approximately where the elbow should be. The part of the spinal column that was supposed to go between the rib cage and the pelvis was instead placed by one group on the underside of the pelvis. I didn’t have the heart, or the guts, to tell them that there is actually no bone there.

The skeletons weren’t the only things not making sense today. Class sizes have gotten a bit uneven. On Monday, I had 13 kids in my class. My other class, Mrs. Bird’s homeroom, had 12. The other four third grade classes had similar numbers.

Today, I have 20 students in my homeroom. Mrs. Bird has 14, and the closest other class has 15. For some reason, our enrollment person, Mrs. O’Reilly, keeps depositing all of the new third graders into my homeroom!

This might not be so bad if they came bearing gifts of frankincense and myrrh, but most of them haven’t even borne pencils or notebooks.

Maybe Mrs. O’Reilly is sending so many students to me because I’m the grade chair this year. This means I get to keep track of things for the grade level and be responsible for receiving and passing on information from the administration. And this year, grade chair is an unpaid position! Woohoo! This is of course why I have the honor of serving in this capacity. The third grade team was asked to choose someone, a vigorous game of rock-paper-scissors ensued, and my strategy of “always go paper” did not serve me well.

But at any rate, even with all of the new kids coming to me, I can be thankful that one holy terror was already firmly planted in another third grade class. His name is Roy’al, which is ironic, because he is a “royal” pain in the buttocks.

This kid has already been sent to Alternative School THREE TIMES!! Once as a first grader and twice as a second grader. Naturally, if he hopes to follow the established mathematical pattern, he’s got to step it up in order to visit “baby jail” three times this year as a third grader. And he’s already well on his way.

We are only midway through the first week of school, and Roy’al has already been suspended for the rest of the week.

You may be wondering, what could he possibly have done to warrant a suspension this soon?



Chewing gum in class?

Nah, too mundane.

Playing in the bathroom?

Not adventurous enough.

Running down the hall, wearing a cape and underwear outside his pants, screaming, “Look at me! I’m Master of the Marble Men!” while sprinkling fresh-grated parmesan everywhere?

Of course not – nobody does that!



No, Roy’al decided to cuss at a little girl in his class and then punch her in the stomach. Or maybe he punched her first and then dropped the F-bomb. Either way, it was two wrongs, which never make a right. However, two wrongs CAN lead to a suspension.

I feel bad for Mrs. Fitzgerald and Mrs. Frisch, who will have to deal with this kid all year. Still, I will gladly take an overload of students and push the boundaries of maximum kiddage rather than have Roy’al in my class. After all, if our skeleton project today is any indication, I already have enough kids trying to put their heads up their rear ends.

Later,



Pat Tella



Date: Friday, August 28, 2009





To: Fred Bommerson



From: Jack Woodson



Subject: Safety is job five





Hey Fred,



Wow, what a first week of school! They still haven’t fixed the air conditioning in our wing, and I saw the classroom thermometer as high as 85° today after recess. The sweltering heat makes it nearly unbearable, but I guess I’ve never fully appreciated the HVAC’s secondary function, which is to carry away undesirable odors. Without a working A/C, the classroom is RIPE with sweaty B.O. after recess!

To answer your question, yes, it’s a huge difference between classes now because of the numbers. After my homeroom 21 (yep, got a new one) leave at 10:30 and Mrs. Bird’s 14 come in, it feels like there are miles between populated desks. Of course you’re right, it makes sense to move a few kids over to 3B and even out my classes, but we can’t do that just yet. Every year we level things out after the first six weeks. By then, the numbers may very well have evened out a bit. At the very least, the kids should have a better grasp of their bone system by then.

Speaking of which, now you’ve got that song “Bad to the Bone” stuck in my head. Thanks a lot. Expect an a cappella version of “MMMBop” on your voicemail real soon.

No skeleton puzzles in class today; instead, my kids made science safety posters. Each group of two or three students had chosen a slogan such as “Always cover your clothes with an apron,” or “Always wash your hands after an experiment.” The posters were not exactly OSHA-quality, but they definitely provided some grins and giggles (griggles).

The early morning group who had chosen “Be careful around sharp objects” drew some very colorful pictures of kids having their eyes stabbed out, their hands cut off, and their backs punctured with forks.

Clear message? Check.

Another group, who had “Always wear safety goggles,” drew a tiny figure with goggles atop an erupting volcano. If only the poor citizens of Pompeii had worn safety goggles.

I found myself almost wishing that the old lady from the district office would stop by again, like she did my first year, to proclaim, “I think safety goggles are SEXY!”

In the afternoon class, a couple of girls had written a very confusing slogan on their poster – “Mittens with hands always wear bad.” They had drawn an equally confusing picture that seemed to show chemicals dripping on someone’s hands, causing bloody stigmata to bloom.

Before you ask, these girls are NOT from Japan, so we can safely assume they had nothing to do with the instructions that come with every batch of solder at Heat Pumps – “Must do not lick up solder unsafe.”

Later in the afternoon, we had a couple of incidents that flew in the face of those safety posters.

At recess, one of Mrs. Frisch’s boys jumped out of a swing at its highest point. Displaying incredibly anti-feline tendencies, he did NOT land on his feet. Instead, he served as a cautionary tale in a new video safety series I’m creating called “The Playground Is Red.”

In all seriousness, it was a relatively minor injury, and I think there was a much larger quantity of tears than blood that came out of the boy. The school nurse took a look at him and sent him back with a wet paper towel and a bandage on his noggin.

The other unsafe moment came at the end of the day, when I almost lost a student.

Because of the high temperatures and the lack of rain, a lot of the earth out by the buses has separated, creating narrow holes, some of which are about a foot deep. I was leading my kids out to the buses when I suddenly heard a yelp from behind me. I turned around and saw that one of Felipe’s legs had disappeared up to the knee! He had stepped in one of the sinkholes and now looked upset, hurt, and confused all at once.

He’s not a tall boy to begin with, and everyone standing around staring at him now appeared to be twice his size.

I hooked my hands under his armpits and lifted him out of the hole, but his shoe remained wedged in the earth! I had to get down on my hands and knees to reach down into the pit and work it free.

Thankfully, I got all of the kids to their buses without further incident. I’ve never lost a student in my teaching career, and I wasn’t about to let some wannabe Sarlaac Pit ruin my track record in the first week of school!

Mrs. Frisch later commented ominously that she hopes the sinkhole will still be there when Roy’al returns from suspension. If it is, I may need to provide safety goggles to my students for that perilous trek out to the bus. Let’s just hope there are no dormant volcanoes waiting to erupt.

Talk to you later,



Hole-ly Moses



Date: Tuesday, September 1, 2009





To: Fred Bommerson



From: Jack Woodson



Subject: Diarrhea of a wimpy kid





Hey Fred,



Either it’s an incredibly eerie coincidence that your A/C is out at work too, or you should be very concerned that my school district has taken over HPU. Either way, it’s going to get real hot, real soon, so I hope for both our sakes that the problem is fixed quickly.

By the way, your (far too vivid) description of a sweat-soaked Larry will give me nightmares for weeks to come.

I’ll see what I can do about getting you a few of those safety posters to put up around the manufacturing floor. No doubt seeing those crayon-rendered depictions of tragedy will inspire the assemblers to follow their safety procedures more cautiously – AND make them fearful that management has lost their marbles.

I’m about to lose my own marbles here. Only seven days into the school year, and already I’ve received about 800 requests to go to the restroom. This is in addition to our regularly scheduled class bathroom breaks, mind you.

Breaks which usually take three times longer than they should, courtesy of the girls.

When we take our class breaks, I send four boys and four girls into their respective bathrooms. As each child comes out, another goes in, until everyone is finished. The entire group of boys is usually finished before the first girl has even exited. This is not the case with my afternoon class, which includes a couple of boys who sit in the bathroom for nearly ten minutes after lunch each day. I feel like I should start offering Tyler and Antonio a copy of the Wall Street Journal to peruse during their “thinking time.”

Back to the morning class, though, and the girls. After a few bathroom breaks that seemed to last longer than The English Patient, I asked Miss Palmerstein, another third grade teacher, to stick her head in the girl’s restroom and find out what was going on with my kids. She told me that she saw a girl walk into the bathroom, push open the first stall door, give a long, lingering look at whatever was inside, and then move to the next stall to repeat the process.

Now that I know what they’re doing, when things seem to be moving slowly, I shout in at them, “Just pick one and go! Stop comparison shopping!”

We take our class break around 9:00 each morning. The kids know that. Still, it doesn’t stop them from asking individually if they can make the trip, sometimes as early as 8:05!

Today, I finally decided to take a moment of class time and read to them “The Boy Who Cried Wolf.” Primarily so that I could follow it up with my own version of the story – “The Kid Who Cried Bathroom.”

It’s usually fairly obvious when a child is truly having a potty emergency and when they are trying to fake it. Especially when they feel the need to accompany their request with an exaggerated version of the Pee Pee Dance, suggesting that if I don’t immediately say yes, the room is going to be flooded.

However, I have had kids leak on themselves – remember “My bowels be runnin” from long ago? – and that is never a good thing. So now I am always leery about what basically comes down to a game of “bathroom chicken.”



Student X: “I gotta use it!”

Me: “We just took a class bathroom break twenty minutes ago.”

Student X: “It’s an emergency!!”

Me: “Come on, you just went. You don’t need to go again.”

Student X: “Oh yeah? Watch this!”

[Student’s face starts turning red, grunting sounds begin emanating, thin sheen of sweat appears on student’s brow…]



In my never ending quest to prevent self-soilage AND deception, I have found two tricks that usually work pretty well. The first is to give the student a choice in the matter. “OK, you can go to the restroom now, but you’ll have to sit out for five minutes of recess, OR, you can hold it.”

I call that my “Sponge Statement,” because it’s amazing how often those words will seem to immediately soak up the impending deluge in the kid’s bladder and allow him to resume his class work with ease.

The second trick, when I’m pretty sure that they really do need to go, is to time them. I usually give the boys one minute and the girls two minutes, and I tell them that if they’re not sitting back at their desks again when that time is up, they will miss 10 minutes of recess (or 15, or 22 ½, or whatever strikes my fancy at the time).

Of course there are some kids who couldn’t care less about whether they have recess or not. These are usually the same kids that consistently do not do their homework or bring back required signatures from their parents. But those kids are the exception, and those two tricks have worked pretty well for the majority of my kids.

For the others, I’m thinking about printing out a copy of “The Kid Who Cried Bathroom” for their lengthy stall visits. If they’re going to miss math instruction, they may as well work on their reading skills.

Talk to you later,



Willie Makeit



Date: Friday, September 4, 2009





To: Fred Bommerson



From: Jack Woodson



Subject: Your answer doesn’t make any cents





Hey buddy,



Though it might seem fun, I don’t know that I’d suggest giving Larry a time constraint when he goes to the bathroom. Isn’t he the one who boasts loudly about staying in there until his legs go numb? You may as well put a copy of War and Peace in there.

And leave it to Tom Winter to mix up his stories. The REAL story is “The Boy Who Cried Wolf.” MY story is “The Kid Who Cried Bathroom.” Tell Winter to stop crying “WOLF!” while IN the bathroom!

Enough potty humor. Let’s move on to one of my favorite subjects – money, money, money!

Our topic for the week has been counting and adding money. The kids have to identify a collection of coins in a picture and then find the total amount of money.

I have bucketfuls of fake money to use when I teach this topic. I’ve got plastic coins of all denominations and bright green paper bills. When I first pass these out and let the kids begin using them, I always make the announcement, “This is not real money! Please do not steal any of it from me and then try to go buy a Slurpee with it!”

Most of the kids laugh at my joke, but every year I hear a small, “Awwww!”

Today, we were going over the homework and I noticed that one of the problems had coins that were all showing a tail side. There was a quarter, a dime, and a couple of nickels. I pointed this out to the kids and advised them that they would need to be able to recognize the tail images as well as the heads to get money questions right. We agreed that the quarter has an image of an eagle, and the dime shows a picture of a torch. Then I asked what the image on the back of the nickel was. Most of the kids shouted out, “The White House!” but in my afternoon class, Mickey beat them all to the punch, shouting out, “That’s the big jail house!”

Sadly, no. A nickel might be the hourly wage for someone living IN the big jail house, but it does not display such an image. And E Pluribus Unum is NOT Latin for, “Don’t drop the soap.”

Ella was having other money problems on Wednesday. I spent about ten minutes with her on what started out as a simple question.

She had written “200 cents” as an answer for one of her questions. I asked her, “What is another way we could say that?”

She stared at me uncomprehendingly, so I tried to clarify. I said, “That answer is not wrong, but usually when the number is that high, we use a different unit for money. Can you say 200 cents a different way, using that other unit?”

She thought for a moment and then responded, “200 dollars?”

Since cents and dollars are not the exact same thing, her response began the long, complicated discussion of how many cents are in one dollar. Getting that answer out of her was like pulling teeth. Teeth that apparently would have wildly fluctuating values for the tooth fairy.

I asked Ella to imagine that she had one dollar in her pocket, and I asked how many cents that would equal. She corrected me and informed me that she actually had SEVEN dollars in her pocket. My mistake.

I tried a different tact. I asked if she were to give me one of her dollars, how many cents would I need to give her for it to be a fair trade? One cent was her answer.

I immediately made the trade and moved on to the next student.

Just kidding. I continued my gluttony for punishment and jumped back into the conversation.

“So you could give me one dollar bill, and I could give you one penny, and that would be fair?” I asked.

Her head said no, but her eyes said she had no clue.

Ella’s next guess was that one dollar was equal to twenty-five cents. So I took a quarter out of my pocket, placed it on her desk, and asked, “This equals one dollar?”

“Four cents?” was her reply.

Although she was grossly wrong, I thought I understood where that answer had come from and that it meant she was at least stumbling towards the right path. Sure enough, when pressed further, she confirmed that she had gotten that last answer by adding the quarter four times.

So I asked her to write down twenty-five cents four times on her paper and add them up. She did that and came up with – gasp – 100 cents.

“Yes, one dollar equals one hundred cents!” I confirmed. “So how many dollars would TWO hundred cents be worth?”

“Seven dollars?”

At that moment, I honestly felt like I was stuck in the middle of a MasterCard commercial.



“Math Journal – One dollar and fifty cents.

Demonstration Quarter – Twenty-five cents.

Incomprehensible Mathematics Conceptual Error – Seven dollars.

Bleeding head wound, caused by pounding my head on the surface of the desk – Priceless.”



Talk to you later,



Seven Dollar Billy



Date: Tuesday, September 8, 2009





To: Fred Bommerson



From: Jack Woodson



Subject: I ain’t got time to bleed





Hey dude,



Wow. Those guys at LaserTel sound like a bunch of winners. Bring them down to my classroom sometime and we can all conference together. That way, maybe Ella will finally learn what 200 cents is equal to, and the LaserTel guys will finally learn that 200 cents will only buy them about an eighth of a heat pump. Until then, it sounds like we both should buy stock in Motrin for banging our heads against solid objects.

Also, please tell Tom Winter that his suggestion of screaming, “SHOW ME THE MONEY!!” in Ella’s face is not conducive to a learning environment.

Did I tell you that I have a hemophiliac in my class this year? No, that’s not a girl with a Wee Willie Wahoo – that would be a hermaphrodite. Hemophilia is a condition where the blood doesn’t clot properly.

It’s actually a very big deal, because if Lance got cut, or even scratched, he might lose a lot of blood before it could be stopped. Accordingly, at the beginning of the year, Nurse McCaffrey brought a passel of paperwork around to all of Lance’s teachers explaining the condition and making it clear that he was to be sent to the clinic immediately if anything ever happened.

You might think then that Lance would be a very methodical, reserved, careful child. You might also think that gold plated ceramics make a nice Mother’s Day present. You would be wrong on both counts.

Lance is just as reckless and rambunctious as they come, and I’m amazed that I haven’t had to send him to the nurse every day.

The lucky streak ended today, though. I was passing out a worksheet to all of the kids, when from behind me I heard someone cry out, “I’m bleeding!”

This proclamation was not shrieked in horror or screamed with any sense of pain or urgency. It was more in the tone of someone impatiently waiting to place a food order – “I’m ready now!”

My heart stopped for a second, and as I turned around in slow motion, I thought, “Please don’t be him. Please don’t be him.”

Sure enough, it was Lance, looking down at a paper cut on his finger. A paper cut, that most minor and insignificant of scrapes. It’s the Detroit Lions of bodily injuries.

Nevertheless, a paper cut could be disastrous for someone like Lance, so I flew into action. “Go to the clinic! Now! No, you don’t need a nurse’s slip or a hall pass! JUST. GO. NOW!”

I got him out the door in about five seconds. As I was walking back to the center of the room, Jessie, who also sits at Lance’s table, said, “I think I have a paper cut, too.”

“Oh, you’ll be fine,” I said, without even glancing at him.

That Teacher of the Year distinction will NOT elude me this year!

Switching from quick bleeders to slow thinkers, I encountered yet another concrete example of the lack of problem solving capabilities that I am facing this year. As we were switching classes, one of the girls in the afternoon group named Chassany came into my room bawling. I escorted her out into the hallway and away from the class to give her some room and some time to compose herself while the rest of the class got settled in and started on the word problem up on the board. Then I went back out to talk with her about what was going on.

Chassany told me that she was crying because she had gotten in trouble with Mrs. Bird for talking in the hall. I asked her, quite rationally I thought, what she could do to prevent that from happening again. She stared at me, dumbfounded.

I prompted her, “Do you have any ideas?”

She just gave me that miniscule shoulder shrug that seems to speak volumes. It conveys everything from, “I dunno,” to, “Frankly, I don’t care enough to even pretend that I’m interested in attempting to think of an answer to your question. Also, I have no idea what your question even was.”

I spoke as slowly and as calmly as I could. “You got in trouble for talking in the hallway, right?” I asked her. When she nodded, I continued, “So what do you think you should do so that you DON’T get into trouble again?”

Nothing but a blank face. She had absolutely no answer for me. It’s not like she was being sullen and refusing to speak. She really and truly didn’t have any clue how she could avoid getting into trouble for talking in the hall.

Awesome.

Oh, and have I mentioned that Chassany is obsessed with my hair? Every time I talk to her, I can tell that her eyes are focused on the top of my head. She seems to have no interest in the buzz cuts, fauxhawks, and “booty fades” worn by her classmates, but for some reason my haircut fascinates her.

Today’s conversation was no different. Even through all the tears, I could see her glancing up above my forehead.

I just wanted to shout, “Excuse me, young lady, my eyes are down here!”

I will admit that when my hair is cut short, like it is now, it can look a bit spiky in front. I suppose in addition to weathering Chassany’s stares, I’ll have to be on guard against scraping Lance with a sharp lock of hair.

That would not look good on a résumé.

Talk to you later,