How to Inspire Today’s Youth March 5, 2013

What is wrong with this picture? Nothing, if you are okay with getting fired and working ten-year-olds into a foaming fury of too many chicken nugget hormones!

Yeah, man, we’re awesome educators! We are making poetry come alive by using contemporary song lyrics.   If we made the assignment “Find the hidden f-bomb,” that would be our number one engaging lesson of the school year; the one that students would talk about fondly in the future (seeing as how we don’t have field trips anymore). “Remember when Ms. Peachy had us read the song lyrics that said ‘f—ed up?’ That was the best day ever.” Alas, not today, young Turk. Not today. Because, by the grace of God,  Ms. Peachy read the words before you had a chance to.

I have never personally heard the song, “Gym Class Heroes,” but you can bet I’m going to be looking it up real soon now.  The title alone, for me, is hilarious, as our gym is host, primarily, to impressive brawls, second only to the cafeteria, where one needs only to whisper the words, “You’re dirty,” to set off a virtual West Side Story scene, sans pretty music and dancing. Heroes abound.

Amidst the knock-down drag outs and the descriptive language exploration, my most velcro-like student asked me, over and over, to send him to the nurse because his lips hurt.  Just in case  you don’t know, we teachers do try to stick to a blood/puke policy when it comes to the nurse (although we cave when we are really really tired of a certain kid’s pleading. “Just go!”).  Rarely do we send a lip-related emergency, especially an invisible one.  “Feel it!” he implores.  ”

“I am not going to feel your lip!”

“No, it is below my lip!” Excellent use of the concept of “below” for our English language learner.

“I am not going to feel below your lip. Stop asking me. Tell your family you need some chap stick.”  This is a risky proposition when you take into account the fact that this student questioned me when he saw me putting on lipstick one day.

My expert explanation: “It’s lipstick. So my lips don’t fall off.”

“But you are a MOTHER!” He was sort of perplexed in a horrified way. Apparently,  in his culture, one’s lipstick years are behind one when childbearing sets in.

Still, when he left school at the end of the day, he assured me that he would be getting some lipstick.  I gently reminded him that he would prefer chap stick. Thumbs up all around.

Funny, Funny Humor Rules. It’s Funny. September 15, 2012

Number 3. Number 3. Number 3.

I love it when my friend calls to tell me she is coming to kidnap me to attend a surprise birthday party for another friend that I truly never see anymore.  We are not going in time for the SURPRISE! thing, mostly because our merely showing up will be such a shock that we thought it would be best not to trigger any cardiac events.

I hate it when websites that I use all the time, to pay bills and such, announce that they are streamlining and making it all so much easier for me!  The subtext of this is as follows:

“Hello! We really want you to have such a tough time navigating our new and improved website that when you get so frustrated that you give up, you will forget to pay your bill and we can assess a disproportionately large late fee, enabling us to pay our fabulous I T Department for having pissed off thousands of customers like you! ”

I love/hate it when I read one of those Daily Posts on the Freshly Pressed page, down below the Pressed people, and the topic is humor blogging.  It was kind of suggesting that there are ways to be funny, and there are no-nos—things like not knowing how to pluralize the word “no-no.”  There was allusion to a magical principle of comedy becoming more comedic with the deft application of the Golden Three, where the writer woos the reader by incorporating some version of concept repetition in threes.  This may be true.  I don’t know that I will build my humorous house on the idea.  It makes me happy to write and make fun of crap that is not funny, often.  I also enjoy writing about random stuff that I think is funny, but that most folks just don’t.

I love that I have found a handful of smart, funny bloggers who get a kick out of it too, sometimes. See how I wrote the word “funny” in the title THREE TIMES?! Hot damn! That WAS funny! I stand corrected, WordPress.  Oh, and I apologize for not crafting a more cohesive and satisfyingly flowing blogpost here.  Do I really need to discuss the website issue, or would it be less self-indulgent if I removed it?

I also apologize for the unsatiated feeling that you are having right now, due, no doubt, to the fact that I wrote FOUR “love, hate, love-hate, love” components.  Be patient.