The Legend of Earl the Mutant Badger

In honor of April Fools Day, (a.k.a. the second worst day to live in a junior high... the very worst being Valentines Day)  I thought I would share the story that I have been using to keep kidlets awake in my classes since moving into my current classroom a few (actually, more than a few) years ago. Enjoy! 

You have all heard the tales of terror about the mammoth monster who haunts the ceilings of Cowtown’s Junior High School. For years, his name has struck fear into the hearts of the ‘tweens who walk these halls. You know that, in this school, you are never alone, you are always being watched.  Earl is always there, waiting.

You know that Earl lives in the ceilings of the school, usually above this classroom, or near Mr. Hanks classroom. You know that he is a huge, mutated badger with a taste for human flesh…preferably the fleshy feet of 7^th and 8^th graders. But what you don’t know, is how he got that way.

Earl actually started his life as an almost normal badger cub. The only thing that set him apart from the rest of the cubs in his neighborhood was his abnormally long sharp claws.  

Earl’s family lived in a den in Budge Field, behind the old high school. He spent his early years living under the field, listening to the football players and track runners above him. He loved the smell of his sweaty tennis shoes, and the sound of their footsteps were his lullaby for his afternoon naps. That is where his love for middle school feet began. 

When Earl became a teenager, his parents sent him out into the world to build his own den and make his own life. 

Because he loved the sounds and smells of ‘tween athletes, Earl naturally wanted to make his home near a junior high. 

Eventually, he found a hole that led to the foundation of this building. 

He sneaked inside and built his first den under the locker room… the stinky foot capital of the school.

He lived there happily for a few months, drinking kidlet flavored water than came through the shower drains… like a junior high student sweat soup. 

What Earl didn’t know about that delicious concoction was that there was more than foot sweat lurking in that used shower water.

Because this was the early 1990’s, big 80’s hair styles were still extremely popular. That meant that, when the kidlets showered after PE, they were also washing gallons of toxic hair spray down the drains.

After six months of drinking the toxic hairspray sludge, Earl started to mutate. He started to grow at an alarming rate. By the start of the second semester in 1991, Earl had grown to the size of a large dog.

His huge mutated body needed extra nourishment, kidlet soup just wasn’t enough anymore. That was when Earl started going through the lockers during PE and eating the shoes that had been left in the lockers. 

The shoes had soaked up a lot of junior high foot sweat, so they tasted delicious. Unfortunately, most kids in the early 90’s wore Nikes… and Nikes in the 90’s were really big and really bright… and really toxic. Eating the shoes just made Earl bigger, meaner, and hungrier. By the end of the 1991 school year, Earl had grown to the size of a small horse.

Then, because of summer vacation, Earl’s food supply dwindled. There were a few sports camps and volley ball practices in the gym, but there was never enough shower soup or stinky shoes to fill him up. By the time August rolled around, his constant hunger had left him mentally unbalanced. 

When the football season started, Earl couldn’t wait to sink his teeth into some sweaty shoes. As soon as the players left the locker room, Earl emerged from his den under the showers and started devouring every shoe he could see. He didn’t pay much attention to what he was eating, until he ate one shoe that tasted extra good. It was like eating a chocolate covered cherry or a jelly filled doughnut. Earl was trying to figure out what had made that shoe taste so different and so good, when he heard a scream.

Earl suddenly realized that, he had been eating so quickly, he hadn’t noticed that not all of the boys had left the locker room. He had accidently eaten a shoe that was still occupied by a foot! Earl escaped just as the football coaches came running in to see why their star kicker was screaming. Earl knew that first taste of foot couldn’t be his last, he was addicted!

For the next few years, Earl continued eating the feet of the BJHS footballs teams, which explains why Burley football teams have such a reputation for being bad…it is difficult to play football with when you are missing your feet!

Eventually the school board voted to seal off Earl’s lair under the locker room. They had hoped that he would move on and maybe build a den at one of the schools across the river. Unfortunately, Earl only wanted to eat the feet of Bobcats. When he no longer had access to the school’s foundation, he moved to the ceiling above room 160. He would lurk there until half way through the class periods, when the students started to doze off. Then he would creep down from the celing and chew of the toes of the sleeping students. 

When I moved into this classroom in 2008, I had no idea that Earl lived here too (although I did wonder why the teacher who taught was footless…). Then one day during a particularly boring honors English lesson,  the half-asleep class was awakened by a blood curdling scream. 

I turned on the lights and looked around. That is when Spencer Atkins pointed to an empty desk and shouted “Taniquia is gone!” Then Cara Hansen pointed to the ceiling where a tile was missing. 

The kids climbed up into the ceiling, where they found the personal effects of students who had gone missing over the years. 

They even found a note from one of Earl’s former victims. The class formed a search party, but Taniquia was never seen again.

After that, I tried to give slightly less boring lessons so the kidelts wouldn’t be so tempted to fall asleep, because that is when Earl strikes. Every now and then, though, he sneaks down and nibbles off the toes of a few people who dare to doze. So watch your toes!

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.