Disruptions in the Educational Process

The 2008-2009 school year is now officially underway. Class has been in session for two and a half weeks and I have met with each class about five times. That means we have reviewed three of the eight parts of speech, written two poems and one friendly letter, read one short story, and taken notes on non fiction and on the elements of storytelling. It also means that I have told them the stories about Moose getting arrested on the school bus (when we hand out the "bus rules" paper for them to sign), Mike and Greg finding the alligator in the front yard (as an example of a narrative with all the necessary elements of storytelling), and Frankenspider's 2006 invasion of my bathroom (because it is a darn fun story and they finished a writing assignment a lot faster than I had planned). I never mean for my spine-tingle-inducing retelling of the continuing saga of my evil archenemy arachnid to disrupt the educational process, but every year it seems to inspire the kidlets to catch some of the 8-legged residents of their homes and barns which they then bring to school to ask..."Was Frankenspider bigger than this one?" And unfortunately, the creepy crawly in the jar below wasn't our only off-ramp leading me and my kidlets away from the information highway this week. Of course, some of the disruptions were only slightly my fault. Take Thursday, for example. My honor's class was reading a short story by Hemingway (Yep. Hemingway. In seventh grade. My kidlets are geniuses) and I thought they deserved a little sunlight and fresh air so we sneaked out the back door for some small-group reading.
Midway through this delightful learning experience, shouts rang out. Then screams. Then a mix of shouts and screams. A bug had been sighted. A big bug. He was promptly dubbed "Earnest"and immediately became the center of the seventh grade universe for the next five minutes.
By the time the poor thing managed to escape (he made a brake for it after one of the boys tried to relocate him into the hair of a nearby girl) the education train had been completely derailed.
Of course, that was nothing compared to the attention train wreck that resulted from the missing tile in my ceiling (a.k.a. "death from above"). The broken tile was the result of the wind tunnel that is created when any two of my room's three doors are open, but that story wasn't very exciting so I told the kidlets that it was the result of a massive temper tantrum thrown by our fictional class pet, Earl the Mutant Foot-Eating Badger. Earl's creation was kind of an accident. I was trying to spice up a boring concept and ended up inventing the existence of a huge badger that lived under the floor and only ventured above ground to eat the feet of unsuspecting students (toes of kids who ate Doritos for lunch are his favorite, but he does like a good flip-flop-rubber scented heel for dessert). Earl eventually became a staple in the grammar worksheets I wrote and a favorite topic of the kidlets in their free writing. Over the summer, the custodians glued the slit in the carpet that marked the "entrance" to Earl's "den" so I relocated him to the ceiling. It seemed like a good idea at the time. But that was before the yearbook staff decided to take the Legend of Earl to the next level by planting Earl-related artifacts in the ceiling where they would be noticed by the impressionable (and gullible) seventh graders.
It was at this point that I abandoned all hope for any kind of educational experience taking place that day. I mean, when kids are disappearing into the darkened bowels of the school, its time to give up on handing out the worksheets, right? Instead I watched as they fabricated evidence of a Badger perpetrated kidnapping. A dirty sweatshirt. A single shoe. A pencil with "badger" teeth marks. And, of course, notes.

The notes were pleas for help from the fictional victims of the of the fictional badger. And since these are the yearbook kids, the notes were publication quality material. The desperate pleas for help and warnings to the students left below were both heartbreaking and terrifying. The kids even crumpled them up and rubbed dirt on them to make them look more authentic. Needless to say, the educational process was disrupted once again when the notes were nudged out of the ceiling by a slight breeze during an English class the next day. I haven't seen seventh graders so fired up since I told them about our room being haunted by the ghosts of the chickens that my ancient history students mummified two years ago.
So, after a week of my educational pursuits being sidetracked by disruptions that were not entirely my fault, I was pretty relieved when my prep hour rolled around and I could refocus on lesson planning and grading...

...until I opened my cupboard and found the cupcakes that Lacie and Timbri had made for me.

I guess distractions and disruptions come in all shapes and sizes and flavors...
...ummmmmmm. Chocolate.