My LOST Voice

I have been living on a completely different plane of existence lately. And while the levels of surrealness I have been experiencing might be perfectly normal on an episode of LOST, they are not perfectly normal in the life of a cute little rural school marm like me.
I haven't missed a day of school in weeks, but I also haven't really been present for those two weeks either. The wheels of the educational process have been spinning in my classroom, but my classes have been at a standstill.

At this point, the evil smoke monster from LOST could make an appearance in the lunch room out side my classroom and start tearing the lunch ladies limb from limb and I wouldn't bat an eye.

So how did I end up in this teaching twilight zone?

I lost my voice.

That may not seem like a big deal to some, but for a person as vociferously verbose as me, the inability to talk while teaching is a tragedy of epic proportions. Think Tiger Woods trying to golf with two broken arms, or Emeril attempting to whip up a culinary masterpiece without the use of his taste buds or scent sniffers.

A teacher without a voice is like a chalkboard without chalk: flat, dull, useless... and we both make really annoying noises to boot.

I tried using my nifty megaphone that not only amplifies voices, but can make a speaker sound like a chipmunk or Darth Vader or an evil robot or a chipmunk who is impersonating Darth Vader while being attacked by an evil robot. It worked fine for about thirty seconds, but then I had to put it away because all of the kidlets kept wanting to know when they were going to get a turn with the megaphone. They were pretty disappointed that I wasn't as willing to share my toys with them as they were to share their strep viruses with me.

This particular bout with voicelessness has been especially annoying because the kidlets and I recently hit the really exciting part of our second semester novel.

I have spent a lot of time and energy over the past six weeks helping the kidlets get sucked in to Avi's tale of intrigue and murder on the high seas.

The classes have been racing to see who can reach out port at the end of the final chapter first...

...but just as the mutant shark and killer squid blindsided the unsuspecting crews of my 1B and 2B classes, my 16 days of silence have left me dead in the young adult literary waters.

I like to read the climatic chapters out loud to each class to make sure that they feel the full impact of the nail-biting plot twists. My favorite part of the story time process is when we get to a really exciting part - - so exciting that the kidlets have stopped following along in their class copies and are staring up at me, wide eyed, lost in the moment and waiting with baited breath to find out what will happen next. That is the moment when I like to throw in a plot twist of my own. Something like, "And as Charlotte, after escaping certain death yet again, took a deep breath and turned to bask in the warm light of the mid day sun...Mr. Morgan charged her from behind and pushed her overboard into the pleasantly surprised jaws of a hungry shark. The end." I love the second and a half of confused silence that follows, just before they start whipping through pages of the book to figure out what the heck just happened. I really love it when they figure out that I was just messing with their cute little heads. Hell hath no fury like a seventh grader who thinks they have been betrayed by their lit teacher. It's more fun to watch than...well, an episode of LOST.

So since I have missed out on so many great head-messing-moments with this novel, I am really hoping my voice returns before the kidlets and I start reading the fantastic narrative poem, The Highwayman. This school year would be a complete and total waste if I didn't get to dress up as the characters for the kidlets to interview for their newspaper articles. I have been working on my "red coat" accent, and my "Tim the Ostler" impersonation since last year, so I would hate for all of that preparation to be for naught.

Over the last two weeks, my voicelessness has often left me with the urge to scream...which of course I can't do because my voice is lost, and that just frustrates me even more. It is a vicious cycle. So if any of you out there in blog land have any idea where my lost voice might be found, nothing would make me happier than un-losing that once-unappreciated voice.

Wait...actually there might be one thing that would make me happier than finding my lost voice: finding the guys from LOST.

I really wouldn't mind whispering sweet nothings into their ears.

But being able to read the final chapters of The True Confessions of Charlotte Doyle to my kidlets would be a close second.