52 ways to touch yourself without taking your clothes off

Mrs Chan came up to me today (she's my instructional aide in charge of helping my special education students). "You have to move Veronica," she stated baldly. She's normally good-natured, but her face brooked no argument today.

Crap, what now?

"Sure thing, but why?" I asked (It does have a bearing on where I move them. For example, talkers and wigglers get moved next to bossy kids so they get the crap kicked out of them whenever they bug the people around them. Daydreamers get moved in front of me so I can badger them to my heart's content).

"Well......," she started, then looked uncomfortable. Definitely not normal for Mrs. Chan. "You know how Ryan sits behind her"

Um, yeah....

I nod.

"You know how he's started to wear those silky pants?"

Uh oh. I have a sneaky suspicion I know where this is going.......

"Well.....he sits at the corner of the table, you know.....and lately, he sits with his legs around the table leg.....and then he starts talking to Veronica and he starts rubbing himself on the table leg.......", ..........and Mrs. Chan pauses significantly, looking at me expectantly.

Thankfully, this isn't my first rodeo.

"Let me guess: he's masturbating on my table leg while he's talking to Veronica, right?"

Mrs. Chan looks so relieved, I have to laugh: it couldn't have been easy on her, trying to tell me this.

"So you're going to move Veronica,right?"

I assure her I will move Veronica. What I don't tell her is, moving Veronica isn't going to stop Ryan getting his jollies on my table leg (I am sooo not touching that table again). Now that Ryan has figured out his penis does other stuff than urinate, it's probably going to see more rubbing than a ShamWow.

I had to call my mom and tell her about this. You see, mom's a former special education teacher. I thought she could use a laugh.

"Oh that's nothing," she replied. "Did I ever tell you about the book Maggie (Maggie was the name of her instructional aide) and I wanted to write? We wanted to call it '52 ways to touch yourself without taking your clothes off'. Seriously. In one school year, we counted 52 separate ways."

Wow.

And she proceeded to tell me several of her favorite ways her students figured out how to pull out that ShamWow cloth and buff up the classroom without taking off a stitch of clothing. Here is a few gems gleaned from her years of experience:

- The Obvious- reach down the pants.
- The Less-Obvious- reach in your pockets.
- The Less-Obvious-2-pretend your hands are cold and shove them in your crotch to warm them up.
- Ryan's favorite: straddle a table leg.
- lean against the edge of a desk and wiggle.
- take an umbrella (only works with the long kind, not the collapsable kind) and roll the handle back and forth rapidly in your hands in front of you.
- pull your shorts up really high and wiggle.
- put an open book in your lap and wiggle: also known as the single-cover method.
- the double-cover method: put the book in your lap and open and close the cover rapidly.
- lean against the door frame, face-first, and roll in and out of the room.
- put a stapler in your lap and rock (makes an unfortunate "click-click, click-click" noise. Also have to worry about accidental stapling).
- put a large rubber eraser down your pants and wiggle (notice how a lot of these require vigorous wiggling? Welcome to my world).
- straddle a chair and rock in a 180 degree circle from left to right.

As my friend Chuckles says, "I.....I got nuthin...."

Angst

So it's March. The hardest month. Statistically, this is the month when teachers refer the most number of students to the vice principal. It's the month when the most number of detentions occur. It's also a month when we have no holidays.

This is the month of angst. The month when the teachers hate the students and the students hate the teachers. When everyone just wants a friggin break. When you just want everything to end and the end is nowhere in sight. So pardon my spleen: it needs a little venting.....

1. No, I will not give you another pencil. What the hell did you do with the last 2 I gave you, eat them? Lose them in an orifice? What?
2. Stop picking your nose. It distracts the hell out of me when I'm trying to teach and I can't stop thinking about what you've wiped on your papers when I'm grading them. And speaking of your papers, I DO NOT GRADE HOMEWORK DONE ON A FUCKING POST-IT NOTE, SO STOP TRYING TO TURN ONE IN!
3. When you smell like cheese, it's time to take a shower. And Axe body spray does not cover the smell, it just makes you smell like a hideously-smelling cheese.
4. I am not your mother and i don't clean up after you, so stop pretending my entire classroom floor is your own personal garbage can. Besides, if I was your mom, I'd beat the shit out of you for doing that.
5. I do not teach Romper Room. I don't care if Jacob stole your pencil: if you're running in my room, you're getting detention. Deal with it and shut the hell up. And beat up Jacob when I'm not looking so I don't have to punish your ass again.
6. If you were talking when I was teaching, do not expect me to feel sorry for you when you have no idea how to multiply a fraction and a mixed number together.
7. Yes, you have homework. And even if I wasn't planning on giving you homework, you have homework now.
8. Only geniuses and idiots do math in pen. You are not a genius.
9. If you were passing notes in my class and Maddie stole your note and showed all her friends what it said, publicly embarrassing you, karma's a bitch.

Since I'm on vacation...

I'm currently out on mid-winter break (often referred by teachers as "ski week"), so the posts may be a bit thin this week. Since I won't have any new stories to share for a while, let me relate an old one that I haven't yet gotten to.

We were doing an experiment based on bubble gum. The students weigh several pieces of bubble gum, then chew the gum for 10-15 minutes, or until the gum loses its flavor, then weigh it again to see how much sugar was in the gum before. Yes, spit does add some mass, but gums like Fruit Stripe and Hubba Bubba lose up to 75% of their mass, which surprises most people. You see what a fun teacher I am?

Anyways, part of the unit requires students to research the history of gum, and I allowed my students access to a computer to do this. I had a couple of students on the computer, when one of them came up to me with a funny expression on his face. Like he was nervous.

"Mrs. W, could you come see our computer? We didn't mean to go there, but I don't want the school getting mad at us."

Mystified, I followed the student.

"We typed in 'bubble gum' and this picture popped up."

Apparently, our pornography filter doesn't work on images. The title of the picture was "bubble gum" and the woman in the picture, blowing a bubble, was stark naked. All the boys looked really nervous now.

"Ok guys, I understand," I replied. "Turn it off and I'll be sure the office knows it was a mistake."

Relieved, they closed the picture and moved on to more legitimate sites. Proof positive that the internet is mainly used for porn, methinks.

Now I know the district checks on less than 1% of the sites viewed in schools, and they're usually looking for sites with obvious porn names, like "hot asian sex" or "lesbians" not "bubble gum", but I did let them know, just in case.

At least I know now that they got an education in my class that day.

Things you can't plan for

So I was doing an experiment in my class where my students discovered air pressure. You take two syringes (needle-less, of course), fill one with air, then connect them with a piece of plastic tubing. When you push on the plunger of the syringe filled with air, there's a bit of give, then the other plunger pops up. Voila! Air pressure! This experiment has all sorts of other uses too: fill up the syringes with water instead of air, and you discover quickly that water isn't compressible. It's the reason why we fill brake lines with fluid instead of air, and why air in your brake line results in your brakes not working anymore.

Oh how was I supposed to know what my students would do with this?

Someone in class figured out that, if you take one of the plungers out, you create a mini-vacuum chamber. They experimented with picking up papers, books, and eventually discovered that creating a vacuum on your arm leaves a perfectly circular red spot (see: hickey) on your skin. Next thing I know, several of my students have given themselves perfectly circular hickeys on their arms, necks, and even one particularly red on on the center of a forehead.

So that's why I'm sitting in a bar right now, drinking. Because I need to write a letter to my parents about how their child got a hickey in science class. And because days like this require a drink. There ought to be a law saying that.

WTF?

So I was walking around the class today, minding my own business, when one of my good kids suddenly explodes.  You know the type: always helpful, gets A's without trying most of the time, and usually is the calmest kid in the bunch.  So it's always pretty weird when that kind of kid goes bat-shit bonkers.  He just looked at the boy sitting next to him and told him in that freaky I'm-not-taking-any-more-shit-from-you-so-shut-the-fuck-up voice to "cut......it.......OUT."

I went over to see what caused the entire commotion and got this baffling story.  Apparently, Paul was trying to focus his microscope while Ben, sitting next to him, started to violently and noisily choke himself around the neck with his own hands.  Paul tolerated this behavior as long as he could before exploding.  

Why the hell do I always get the weird ones?

Ah, the joys of young love

Can I just say right now that I hate Axe body spray?

Puberty has officially hit the 6th graders and the smell of love is in the air.  By the smell of love, I mean the hideous reek of old body odor unsuccessfully covered by the hideous reek of body spray.  I swear, there are some places I can no longer go in my classroom because the stench of Axe hovers like a cloud of poison gas.

And then there are the girls.  Perfume marketed to girls are made to attract girls, not boys (colognes are the same for boys.  Please take note: when buying cologne, bring a girl along.  What smells good to you might be female repellent)  As such, they are the most godawful mix of sweet that it gives you cavities from 5 feet away.  

And none of it takes the place of a bar of soap or a stick of deodorant.  Around this time, we have to have the Conversation.  The Conversation goes something like this: "your armpits have turned on, so you can't go 4 days without showering anymore.  And please buy deodorant: you could knock a horse down."

And there's the flirting.  Girls and boys haven't figured out how to flirt properly yet, so you get some pretty amusing results.  I had a boy who went to sharpen his pencil and, on the way back, he suddenly stopped, stroked the hair of one of the girls in class, then returned to his seat.  She looked really confused, so I asked him later why he did it.  He looked at his hand, looked at me, and said, "......I don't know?"

Most boys don't know what to do, so they flirt with the girls the same way they'd complement a friend: by hitting them or stealing their stuff.  Binders and pencils go missing, then the girl has to wrestle the guy to get them back.  Oh, I'm sure he liked it, but she gets pissed off and smacks him one.  To a boy however, this is the highest compliment and he thinks she's flirting back.  So then we have to have the Conversation about "Most people don't hit each other because they like them.  Cut it out before she scratches your eyes out."

Girls flirt differently.  First, out comes the flirty clothes.  Tube tops and string tops, short shorts and tights, bra straps hanging out, tight T-shirts tied in the back with a hair band so every fold and breast is outlined.  Cleavage (is it fair that some of them have more cleavage than me?  God is cruel.)  popping out of too-small bras.  When they laugh, they lean forward, giving the boys a view straight down their top.  School dances are worse!  They'll gang up on a cute boy, one in the back, one in the front, and one on each arm.  Then they shimmy up and down , rubbing all over them.  He's got a goofy grin on his face, unaware of the splendid case of blue balls he's going to have in a few hours.  So the girls get a conversation too: "Save the skimpy clothes for when you're not in school and when it's not 35 degrees or we're going to make you wear the ugliest pair of pants and shirt you've ever seen.  I'm not joking.  We'll stick you in a painter's jumper for the rest of the day."  If we could possibly get away with writing "loaner" on the back with a sharpie, we'd do it.

Looks like nobody's going to get any work done until 9th grade.

Can I input my own grade card comments?

It's probably a little early to be thinking of grade cards, but I've always wondered who comes up with the comments they ask us to use.  Even the sternest comment is sanitized to the point where it's hard to decipher its original meaning.  "Student choices in class may be affecting his/her grade."  What the hell?

Here's some comments I'd like to add to the gradecards.  And remember, you are only allowed to use a maximum of two comments: the district is paying for the paper.

01-Student is a pain in the ass

02-Student reminds me of a jellyfish

03-Cries a lot

04-Goes to bathroom so often, I've wondered about his prostate

05-Won't shut up

06-Needs to bathe and/or wear deodorant regularly.

07-I vaguely remember this student

08-Student is great, but mom needs to cool it

09-Needs to wear looser clothing: is distracting my boys

10-Must learn to think before speaking

11-Please homeschool

12-Aspires to mediocrity

13-Ringleader

14-Student grade improved due to significant teacher and/or parent effort