Shef: I’m going to need some new sunglasses.

Me: Aren’t they still in your kayak?

Shef: No.

Me: Where are they?

Shef: They’re in the deep water.

Me: They fell in the water?

Shef: Yes.

Me: While you were kayaking?

Shef: Yes.

Me: It was an accident?

Shef: No.

I said adios to two classes today. They took their final exams and will be swiftly on their way to junior year. Some shook hands or hugged. Others just gave a shout or wave from the door. Some slunk out without acknowledging the end. Dylan, who had an unfortunate plagiarism episode a week-and-a-half ago after a year of small steps forward and the slow and painful realization that "fuck" is not an appropriate word for the classroom, wrote me a heartfelt note in the back of his Blue Book: “I want you know I love you as a teacher,” he said. “I have a ton of respect for you as a person and as a teacher. I’m sorry I cheated, and I’ll never do it again.”

Good enough for me.

I’m not sure what to say as I’m coming down the homestretch. I’m actually going to miss most some of these sophs. They’re cute and kind of earnest. We’ve gotten along for the most part. Still, there’s a lot to grade, and a lot of it is half-assed and crappy. The sophs, it seems, are readier for summer than their teacher, who becomes depressed when sitting idle, but remains happily distracted from her woes while trucking along at a breakneck pace.

In this trying time I’ve reverted to Aaron Sorkin. Dan and Rachel have been aiding and abetting my addiction. At home, we’ve been watching Sports Night, a show on which the two lead characters are named Dan and Casey. Dan and Casey! Like us, only I’m an initial KC who prefers to be pronounced as a real Casey.

And at home and abroad (at Rach’s house), I’ve been re-living season one of The West Wing, a show I loved so much I thought my heart would burst if I wasn’t home on Wednesdays at eight o’clock from 1999-2004.

I’ll let you know if anything exciting happens between now and Friday.

There’s bound to be at least one thing, I suppose.

Billy is a barely-functional, overly-hormonal soph who manages to do a little work in English maybe once every ten days. Last week, instead of working, he left my room to go to the bathroom. After a half-an-hour, he burst back into the classroom shouting about the size what he produced there. It was really gross.

I try to control him, but I am mostly powerless against this kind of infantile behavior, especially on May 31st, when the count stands at seven days.

So, during class today, Billy shouted out, “Hey, Ms. W! I fathered a child last night.”

“Billy,” I said, not looking up from the papers I was grading, “that’s impossible. No girls would ever go out with you when you act the way you do.”

The class, most of them working pretty hard on their graphic stories due tomorrow, erupted. “Oh, SMACK!” they said.

“Look, Billy,” I said, a little sheepish at having attracted so much attention on his behalf, “I’d be happy to give you tips on how to impress more women.” I kept my eyes on my grade book. “Your first step would be to engage in less public farting.”

Over the weekend, we potty-trained our little redneck. Current stats: three accidents in four days.



Also, Casey Mears won his first Nextel Cup race. Yee-haw.

OTTL Renee and I staged a reunion at the awards night for the graduating seniors that we taught as eighth graders way back in 2002-2003, our one magic year of being teammates.

The kids were cute, and they won a bunch of awards. We had made it through an hour-and-a-half of the ceremony. And then the prize-winning Dramatic Duo from the speech team took the stage.

I’m sure they were quite good, but we’d already reverted to telling fart jokes and poking each other. Their imitation of Squiffy the Tape Worm was only fanning the fire; and I was reminded of the time I turned to her as we walked into a faculty meeting to call her on being a bad influence:

“Look,” I said, still reeling from the scolding I’d gotten from the principal the month before, “I’m just not going to be able to sit next to you at meetings anymore.”

Tonight, as we were laughing backstage waiting to present a scholarship award and she was waving from the wings at the kids on the stage, I beseeched her to show some decorum.

“Do you have any idea how many times you’ve shushed me tonight?” she asked.



Many, many times.

I had to have a sub, and all of my classes were perfect except one group of enriched sophs.

That one group told the sub that they didn’t have to pick up their trash because the janitor would do it for them. They also told her that presentation skills didn’t matter in the projects they were doing (a lie), and so a couple of boys did their talk while lying on their backs, kicking their legs. They also played their videos in slow motion because the group slated to go after them wanted to stall one more day.

Some other kids refused to give the sub information about the activity they were requiring of the class. She wrote to me that “the class has a lot to learn about self-control.” When she told the kids she’d never seen anything like their behavior in all 30 years of teaching and subbing at the high school, they told her that maybe they were acting that way because their teacher wasn’t there.

It’s fair to say I was less than pleased.

A letter was written and read to the class expressing my distinct displeasure. The letter was designed to elicit maximum guilt. The letter included information about the dangers of by-standers: if you think I'm not speaking to you, the letter said, you better think again.

The letter said that the sub report reflected a failure of the whole. The whole certainly included me, the letter said, because I had made the mistake of trusting them with too much independence.

And so we go to 9. Days, of course. I’ve decided I’ll forgive them when they work up the guts to speak to me.