This is Nuts

Today, as I ate my peanut butter sandwich, blissfully free of hives or death by anaphylactic shock, I pondered the conundrum of the peanut and the recent peanut-allergy-related hype.

I realize that my use of the word ‘hype’, a term often used in conjunction with such things as skinny jeans and Gangnam Style dance moves, to describe a serious health concern might offend some people, but I stand by it.  Maybe the nut allergies themselves are not a trend—I’m sure children for decades have been suffering from this hardship—but the amount of attention placed on those afflicted is recent.  Take this example from my teaching career.

In the year 2001, I taught a seventh grader named Andrew.  Andrew was a “normal” kid.  I had no official paperwork on him; he was in no special programs at school; I had not spoken with his parents via phone or meeting.  One day after lunch, Andrew came up to me and mumbled, “Ith hink gotta olden a hut.” 

I said, “What?” 

He said, “I think ig oughta old of an hut.” 

I said, “One more time?” 

He said, “I think I got a hold of a nut.” 

Even when the sounds formed into actual words, I still had trouble comprehending.  Then a lightbulb went on.  “Oh!” I said.  “You mean a peanut?”  He nodded.  “Are you allergic to peanuts?”  Another nod.  “Do you need to go to the clinic?”  More nodding.  I sent him.  The school nurse pumped him full of Benedryl and sent him back to class, where he promptly fell asleep.  And that was that.  No one had told me this kid had a peanut allergy and no one referred to what happened that day as an “incident”.  But these days, things are different.

Last year, in the fall of 2011, I taught five students who had 504 plans (a legal document created for students with a physical or mental impairment that lists classroom needs and accommodations) officially recording their nut allergies.  Paperwork was signed, meetings were held, words of caution were imparted.  Two of these students, I was told, could not even come into contact with a peanut. One girl’s form contained a half-page list of possible symptoms to watch out for and it included, between redness in the cheeks and shortness of breath… (I am not joking here, this is word for word)… a “sense of impending doom”.  Yes.  I signed a legal document during my last year of teaching, promising to—while teaching Language Arts to twenty-six seventh graders in my sixth period class—be on alert for a look of “impending doom” to cross one thirteen-year-old girl’s face, which is a problem since most thirteen-year-old girls wear that expression perpetually anyway.

For those of you not in education, I want to explain this just a tad further.  For those words to appear on that document, a parent had to say them in a meeting with school officials.  School officials had to take them seriously enough to type them into the computer.  A minimum of three adults had to concur in writing that those words belonged on that form.  Now that form follows that girl through every year of school (unless it is later edited or dismissed) and is given to every single one of her teachers, who then become legally responsible for following it.  As a teacher of this student, I was advised not to eat peanuts or peanut products in my classroom before she arrived, despite the fact that peanut butter sandwiches were served every day in the school cafeteria and she never once perished while purchasing her Gatorade in the lunch line.

There were never any incidents with any of those five students.  As far as I know, none of them ever “got a hold of a nut” at school.  However, another student did miss the big state standardized test that year because he had a “food allergy challenge” scheduled for the same day.  The email from his mom regarding this unavoidable conflict included the following:  “[Name] has been allergic to nuts all his life, but recent tests indicate that he may no longer be allergic to some of the tree nuts… We are hoping he can tolerate the pecans in the food challenge, because that will open some doors for him (pecan pies, pralines, etc.).”  This was a very sweet and supportive mom, and it was nice of her to let me know of the absence, but I still find it odd how much random information parents are willing to share with their children's teachers.

Although I find a lot of this ridiculous, with kids I can somewhat understand the paranoia.  I imagine it’s pretty traumatic to watch your small child experience a severe allergic reaction, and I don’t blame parents for wanting to prevent something like that from ever happening again.  (My dog will never be given another rawhide treat after the time I saw him choke on one and had to reach into his throat to pull out the white sticky mass that was lodged there, so I get it.)  In truth, a lot of this documentation is put into place in elementary school when the kids are young and less aware of their health concerns and more likely to eat something they shouldn’t if an adult is not paying attention.  But then the forms go unedited and the next thing you know the kids are in middle school and completely capable of taking care of themselves but still have teachers awkwardly reminding them not to ingest something they haven’t eaten in ten years.

What I don’t understand is when this paranoia carries over to adults.  Every year, my school district held a two-day professional development conference at one of the high schools.  Every teacher was required to attend (though not all did) and presenters from all over the country flocked in to impart their expertise on everything from assessment to vocabulary games.  Beginning in 2004, a bold red text started appearing at the bottom of the email of conference information explaining that a couple of the presenters had severe air-borne peanut allergies and for that reason, they asked everyone not to bring any peanut products into the building during the conference.  ?????  At the sight of that warning, several questions jumped immediately to my mind, the first and foremost of which being How the heck did you people survive this long?  Again those afflicted with this allergy will probably find my words here callous, but I have to believe that this is being blown out of proportion because if an email has to be sent to 2,000 people alerting them of your condition before you can set foot into a public school building, then how are you not a hermit?  How do you go to restaurants and sporting events and parties and (horror of all horrors) the grocery store where aisles and aisles of packaged evil lay in wait to suffocate you?  And how did you get to this conference?  Because the last time I was on an airplane, the nice flight attendant gave every single passenger in that tiny, air-tight cabin a package of peanuts to open and eat and drop on the floor and exhale into the canned air for three and a half hours.

That’s my argument for why all this peanut allergy hype is nuts.  If Southwest Airlines can still pass out these tiny little allergen grenades on their flights, I’m thinking that pretty much everyone else should be able to walk into a building or take a math class without first announcing to the world that their throat could close up if they eat a Reeces.  

Images from:

http://www.xplosivegrowth.com/2012/10/28/5-good-things-to-know-about-peanut-butter/

http://www.peanutvan.com.au/archive.php?start_from=49&ucat=&archive=&subaction=&id=&

http://cheezburger.com/2879331328

http://peanutfreekid.com/store/Default.asp

http://www.weddingwire.com/wedding-forums/nwr-work-related-need-happy-thoughts/dd0a90e4c28258e9.html

Last First?

Me in Kindergarten - 1982

Here it is the first day of school… and it’s just another Monday for me.

I’m looking at all the first day photos on Facebook this morning.  My family had that tradition too.  My brother and I had to stand out on the front sidewalk in our first day clothes and hold up fingers to show what grade we were in.

My first time in 7th grade.
Yikes.

This is the first first-day-of-school that I have not participated in for 30 years.  I had my own first days from kindergarten through 12^th grade, then four years of firsts in college, then 13 more first days teaching the seventh grade.  (I continued the photo tradition for my dad, so there are a LOT of pictures of me holding up seven fingers for the camera.)

People keep asking me if I am ok, asking how I feel about not being in a classroom today.  I’m ok.  Maybe that’s the sad part.  I really am ok.  But still it’s on my mind today—all my friends, all my would-be students, all those bells telling me what to do.  I miss that.  I miss the bells.  They kept me organized, kept me on schedule.  My to-do list today is already far behind and no buzzer or alarm is getting me back on track.  I even had first-day-of-school stress dreams last night.  Something tells me it’s going to take awhile for those to go away.

I’m thinking about what I used to do during the first week of school.  I used to learn my students’ names, as quickly and as correctly as possible.  And sooner than you might expect, I’d know them all.  I’m pretty good at names and memorization anyway, but I also had some tricks that would help.

On the first day of school, I gave each student an info sheet to learn some personal things about them and get my first glance at their writing.  One of the spaces on that sheet asked them to fill in their birthday.  Then, for an evening or two during the first week (often the first night even if I was tired) I would read their information sheets, starring any interesting or disturbing or funny tid-bits, and copy each student’s name and birthday onto a little paper birthday cake or star to put on the “birthday board” during their month.  I’d also go through the info sheets again to copy each student’s name (first and last) to a notecard.  These notecards (color-coded by class) went into a box on my desk and became the “Fickle Finger of Fate”, a way for me to randomly select students for groups or answers or errands or anything else, and a great way to call on them until I knew all their names.

I got my Fickle Finger idea from
my amazing professor, Dr. Flowers.

Every student got a sticker and
a pencil on their special day.

Yes, these things would take time.  I’d often sit on my couch with a favorite movie on TV while I worked, usually a cat in my lap.  But it was the fun kind of time, the worthwhile kind.  No one was making me do that stuff, I chose to and I liked it.  I’ll miss that.  Then last year, my numbers tripled and it wasn’t so fun anymore.  It took two or three movies instead of one and gave me a hand cramp.  Half way through I wanted to stop, but I was already halfway done…  That was the first sign of how difficult the year was going to be.  Even learning my students’ names and writing down birthdays had the fun taken out of it by the sheer quantity of work. 

Me grading my LAST SET of papers last May.
No, I do not usually grade in a dress and heels, but we English teachers
grade whenever and wherever we can.  It was a Saturday morning at 9AM
and I got ready for the baby shower I was going to early.
So... time to grade five tests.  Yes, it is nuts.  But it is what we do. 

But this is not the time or place to complain about last year.  If you want to read about that go to the blog post about why I left teaching.  Right now I want to think about what I miss.

I miss coming home on that first day of school and, no matter how tired I was, writing in my journal—jotting down my first impressions of my students, listing a few names and why they stood out and what kind of person I thought they’d be, then going back months later to re-read and see how right (or wrong) I’d been.  I miss that.  I learned over the years that some of the most rambunctious kids on the first day are NOT your future behavior problems—they are the kids that love school, that are so excited to be back they can’t contain themselves.  Sometimes it’s the quiet ones you have to watch.

Often on the first day of school, former students would stick their heads in my room to say, Hi! and prove to me that they are not the mean, snobby 8^th graders that I swore they’d turn into.  (They realized that was reverse psychology, right?)  I’ll miss that.

I’ll miss choosing the quote of the week and writing the agenda on the board each day.  (Yes, that’s nerdy.  Don’t care.)  I’ll miss reading a poem to the class for the first time.  And teaching them how to write a “Where I’m From”.  And hearing the band play at the pep rallies.  And knowing my friends are just down the hall.

I’ll miss all that.

I don’t know if or when or in what capacity I will ever go back to teaching.  

I wonder if I’ve had my last first day of school?  

First day of school 2011

Science Fair (or The Time My Dad Blew Up the Fifth Grade) – Part 2

My dad, David Kinder,
with his coon skin cap and Bowie knife

Things were different when my dad was a kid.  

When he was in the fifth grade in 1953 in Richardson, Texas, his class once took a field trip, by foot, to a farm a few miles away.  They were pretending to be a wagon train, pulling little red “covered” wagons full of their supplies.   Since they were allowed to dress up as pioneers, the kids carried pitch forks, cap guns, knives, and (some of them) real rifles as they traipsed across town with their teacher.

Things were just different. That’s really all there is to it. 

This is my dad’s story of his fifth grade year, including the time he brought his chemistry set to school and became infamous at the age of eleven.

Enjoy.

When I was about eight years old, I got to wanting a chemistry set (chemical set, as I always used to call them).  I was very interested in mixing things up, and creating my own version of Gruesome Ingredients.  I was also fairly interested in making gunpowder, like Roy Rogers and the Lone Ranger would occasionally have to do in my funny books; but I didn’t stress that part to my parents (Tiny and Pappy) when making my request.  Neither Bailey’s Variety, nor Mr. and Mrs. R.L. Johnson’s Richardson Hardware Store carried anything like that, not even at Christmastime.  But you could find a Gilbert Chemistry Set at the big Sears and Roebuck store on Ross Avenue in Dallas, usually around Christmas, and since my birthday is December 6^th, they were available, and I got my heart’s wish for my birthday present that year!

It was the smaller set, that came in a cardboard box of about the size that a Monopoly set comes in, and didn’t have too much apparatus, and only a few brown bottles of chemicals; but that was all right, I was thrilled to have it!  I used it (probably not proper OR correct to say that I “played” with it) a LOT, and in the course of a few months, I had pretty much gone through it.  I tried just about all the experiments laid out in my manual, and used up most all of my chemicals, and quite a bit of household ingredients, such as vinegar, and borax, that were called for but not supplied in my set. 

And I don’t know if Tiny and Pappy knew it, but I tried a few of the recipes and concoctions mentioned in Pappy’s book of chemistry, too…the big thick red-jacketed volume that he kept on his bookshelf, that got into all manner of interesting concoctions.  Gunpowder, for one…

Anyway, after a few months, about all that was left of my first set, was the box, some empty brown glass bottles, and a couple of pieces of equipment that hadn’t burned up, or broken when dropped because they were hot, or mysteriously corroded and crumbled away, even though they had started out as metal.  So for Christmas when I was ten years old, I begged for a new, BIGGER chemical set.  They knew how much I had enjoyed the other one and nothing had (at that point) ever exploded, there had been no serious injuries, and the smell of burnt sulphur DOES go away… eventually…

So under the Christmas tree that year, was a rectangular present that turned out to be the BIG Gilbert Chemistry Set, the advanced one, in the hinged blue case, full of metal tip-out racks of exotic chemicals, and pipettes, and test tubes, and a flask; tubing, black rubber stoppers (some with a hole through them); tweezers, measuring spoons… just EVERYthing!  Except one little brown bottle, that was supposed to contain Nickel, only had a paper note inside, saying that Nickel was not available at that time.  ???  The Korean War was brewing, I don’t know…?  Anyway, I was ecstatic, and right away I plunged into bigger, more elaborate, more complicated, and DARKER experiments and mixtures!  (Several of them were, of necessity, SECRET experiments…)

I learned a lot, with those chemistry sets.  And I was fairly careful, and was almost always alone in my endeavors, so not putting anyone else… usually… at risk.  I did have a few mishaps.  Sometimes things would go boiling up, or foam out of control, when they weren’t really supposed to, and certainly when I wasn’t expecting it.  Several pieces of clothing got ruined, either by staining, or by burning, or by being eaten through by some experiment spilled or gone wrong.  I got burned on the fingers or hand, often.  And I had glass break, right in my hands, when I would substitute ordinary glass jars or bottles for the Pyrex ones that came with the set, but had already been cracked or scorched or broken.  So there were a couple of minor cuts.  Nothing serious.  Mostly, the occasional noxious smell.

We had two fifth grade classes that year, taught by sisters, Miss Rountree and Mrs. Shaw.  They were both large women and fairly attractive, when I see their pictures in my old yearbook.  They were probably about thirty-five and forty years old.  They were both new to Richardson the year I was in fifth grade, and became very popular teachers.  Mrs. Shaw (the older of the two) was a widow, maybe a war widow, I don’t recall for sure.  I was in her class.

Fifth grade was the year that almost all homework, except math and art, had to be done in ink.  Those were fountain pen and ink years, no ball point pens allowed.  It was the year we studied each of the forty-eight states in great detail, drawing elaborate maps of each one.  (Most kids drew all their states about the same size, pretty well taking up the full sheet of paper, regardless of whether it was Rhode Island, or California.  But I insisted on drawing mine all to scale.  Thus, Texas took up about half a sheet of paper, and Colorado was about 2 ½ inches by 3 inches, and Rhode Island and Connecticut were teeny.  Mrs. Shaw told me I could use as much room as I needed, but I wouldn’t do it any other way.)  It was the year that we did art in watercolor, and I fell in love with watercolors, right there.  Priscilla Waters and my buddy Donnie Skiles were the first kids I knew that ‘dated’, and they were a couple.  It was the year I had (serious) pneumonia for the first time.  It was also the year that I had to fight Larry Lester several times at recess, because we had gone from “best friend” status in fourth grade, to “mortal enemies” in fifth, and I never knew why.

We had a spelling bee in class several times that year, and I always won it.  Then one day, there was a “prize” to be awarded to the winner, and we were all excited.  I won the bee, as usual, and the prize turned out to be, that Mrs. Shaw said I could KISS the girl of my choice in our class!!!  WHAT???  What kind of a deal was THAT???  I thought there was supposed to be a PRIZE!?  Looking back, I think it was a set-up job.  Mrs. Shaw knew I always won those spelling bees and she and my mother were pretty good friends.  Anyway, I didn’t know what to do!  There was NO WAY I was going to kiss ANY girl in that class right about then!  Even though I was sweet on one or two of them, in secret, of course. 

I stood there, stunned and speechless, and I could feel my face turn SCARLET red, and I wished I was ANYwhere else.  Mrs. Shaw said, “Come on, David, you won, you have to do it…” and EVERYBODY was hooting and hollering and laughing… I was trapped, so I thought fast.  I got up and walked up to Mrs. Shaw’s desk, took her right hand, and barely kissed the top of it, and then, humiliated, walked back to my desk and sat down amid much laughing and cheering.  Mrs. Shaw just sat there, still holding her hand out, and still smiling, but now SHE was blushing, too, and I think it pretty much backfired on her.  That was the last time she did anything like that to me, or anyone else.  And I finally got over it, about the end of my senior year…

Actually, except for that one instance, I really liked Mrs. Shaw.  We all thought she was nice, and pretty, and we all thought that those two sisters were PROGRESSIVE (wherever we heard that), and they were always coming up with something new. 

Mrs. Shaw frequently encouraged us students in whatever activities we did for fun, and when she found out that I had a chemical set, she insisted that I bring it to school, and do some experiments for the class for what we (at that point) didn’t yet call “show-and-tell”.  I was overjoyed!  My experiments were now OFFICIALLY SANCTIONED!  NOW, maybe I could get something DONE!  Tiny and Pappy asked me several times, if I had permission to take my chemistry set to school, and cautioned me SEVERAL times, to be careful doing whatever I was going to do…

The day after I brought all my gear in, Mrs. Shaw cleared most of the top of her teacher’s desk, and allowed me to set up, and granted about an hour of the class to me.  Normally very shy, and horrified at being in front of the class, I was now TOTALLY unaware of the rest of the students, completely absorbed in what I was doing, and sublimely confident of the future outcome.  Without any of my normal self-consciousness whatsoever, I began my scientific lab work.

I don’t remember what I did, but I conducted two fairly simple experiments, that I had already tried out at home, and got good results, no big surprises (which was often apt to happen to me, as I sometimes “adjusted’ amounts of chemicals, or added extra ingredients on the spur of the moment).  But on these trials, I played it safe.  Mrs. Shaw frequently had to remind me to “say something”, talk to the class, let them know what I was doing.  I was mostly too absorbed, and was completely unaware of my classmates, but gradually I got to where I would briefly describe what I was up to, Mrs. Shaw constantly telling me to “speak up”.

As I said, things went well.  Blue litmus paper magically turned red; clear liquids weremixed in a test tube, and then an invisible cloud of scent, maybe ripe bananas, would drift across the room.  I was “oohed” and “aahed” in awe, especially by some of the girls.

I kept my set there for a few days, and one day Mrs. Shaw frowned and said something like, “Drat, I’m out of ink!”  We all used ink in most of our subjects that year, and we all kept our bottles of ‘washable blue’ in our desks.  She also used red in a separate fountain pen, to grade with, and she had run out.

In an instant, I shot my hand up in the air, and told her I could MAKE her some red ink!  (I had seen this experiment somewhere in my lab book, but I had never tried it.) She was surprised, and pleased, and told me to come on up and get started!  I cleared off an area of her desk, and set up my gas line and Bunsen burner, and pored over my manual, to see what was required.  I had all the chemicals I needed, and I began measuring and mixing away, and adding water, and then boiled my concoction over the Bunsen burner.  I had never tried this, and it was going to go into a fairly expensive fountain pen, belonging to my teacher, but like my son Pat (who had never taken archery before but signed up for the ADVANCED class at UT because “how hard could it be?”) I was supremely confident.

And it turned out!  In about a half hour, I had her a sufficient supply of red ink, to fill her pen and her empty bottle!  And just for the record, it did not dissolve the innards of her pen, nor the paper she marked on, nor her ink bottle, nor her hand!  It was a complete success!  And then she, and everyone else (except maybe Larry Lester, my mortal enemy, and Glenn Williams, the boy who called me the teacher’s pet) was convinced that I was a child prodigy, and an absolute chemistry genius!

At least I was pretty convinced…

So Mrs. Shaw suggested that I plan and conduct one more experiment the next day (a Friday) before I took my laboratory back home.  She said I could pick anything I wanted to, and we would do it the next day.  Then she asked me if I would like an assistant, and asked the class if anyone else had a chemistry set?  And old William Thomas Tawwater’s hand just SHOT up!

William had been one of my friends since we had met in first grade.  He was not as tall as me, but may have been even skinnier, and he had a mop of really red hair.  He had a slim face, and was ALWAYS grinning, and he laughed his evil little “Hee hee hee” frequently.  William Thomas was a good kid, from a big family, but he was always into something, and he had already gained fame, or maybe infamy, from a fourth grade assignment the year before.  Mrs. Churchwell had assigned us to think up the title of a book that we might someday write.  William Thomas’ choice was “Flowing Yellow Rivers, by William T.T.”  =)  I personally thought it was destined to become one of the classics…

William said that he used to have a chemistry set, and I really liked old William, and so we got together at recess and plotted what we would do.

(To be concluded…)

(And yes, I know what you are all waiting for and, trust me, you will get it in part 3.)

Thanks to Dad for sending these pictures of me and my science projects.  

I had completely forgotten about the wooden display board he made for us.  :)

Left is fourth grade and sugar crystals.  Right is fifth grade and toothpaste.

(I do not know why I am holding a hammer.)

And sixth grade was static electricity.  

Hmm... static electricity... that must be why I have all those ribbons stuck to my shirt.

Science Fair (or The Time My Dad Blew Up the Fifth Grade) – Part 1

When I was in school, we had the Science Fair every year, and that meant every year going through the process of choosing a topic, doing the experiment, writing up the reports, making the tri-fold posterboard of impressive pictures and colorful charts, and presenting to the class. 

In elementary school, I got a lot of help from my parents on this.  Probably too much help to be honest, but it was fun and I did learn a lot.  We worked together to grow sugar crystals in jars (that was fourth grade), study static electricity in fifth grade, and then in sixth grade to test the effectiveness of various brands of toothpaste on stains.  To do this, we made several plaster molds and stained them with coffee, tea, juice, etc.   Then we brushed them using the various brands of toothpastes to see which one worked the best.  Pretty cool.  (Sorry, I cannot remember who was the winner just now.  I’ll get back to you.)

In middle school, I lost interest in the scientific process, my parents stopped helping so much, and my experiments became much less controlled and much less interesting.  In the seventh grade, I “tested” which type of birdseed the birds in our yard preferred, though I really don’t remember how I even pretended to have gathered usable data on that one.  And then in eighth grade, riding that laziness as long as I could, I basically did the exact same project again determining which type of cat food our outdoor cats preferred.  Since they would eat just about anything, I assume there was a lot of fudging of numbers there.  At this point it was obvious I would never be a scientist.

Then, in the ninth grade, we were suddenly allowed to work on our projects in pairs.  (I know now, from my own teaching experience, that Ms. Mitchell probably realized that if she let us work with our friends, we would be happy and she would have half the projects to grade.  It’s a smart plan.) I partnered up with my friend Michele (who did later end up in a scientific field by the way) and she suggested we do our project on RADON. 

Radon (in case you don’t know) is a chemical element.  This noble gas, which is radioactive, colorless, odorless, and tasteless, occurs naturally as the decay product of uranium or thorium and is one of the densest substances that remains a gas.  Radon is considered a health hazard and is responsible for the majority of the public exposure to ionizing radiation.  I know all that because I just googled it.  Trust me, I did not remember it from the ninth grade.  Instead, I poorly paraphrased Wikipedia. There’s a lot more, but I got bored after the first two paragraphs.

The truth is, I don’t know really what radon is and I never did.  Michele had heard about it somewhere and it sounded interesting and smart and we decided to choose it for our topic.  The amount of actual learning that occurred (on my part anyway) was like negative two.  Yeah, I am pretty sure that I memorized a couple of incorrect pieces of information about radon during the process, thus lessening my understanding of the subject.  Go me.

Michele was gung-ho though, and I followed her lead.  We were both good students, excellent students actually, girls who did all their homework and made A’s easily and worked hard.  Leaders in the classroom.  Academic role models.  So, that’s probably why our teacher didn’t catch on to the fact that our project stunk—she left us alone and trusted us to do good work while she helped the strugglers.  (Again, as a teacher, I’ve been there.)

So, unsupervised and unadvised, Michele and I decided that our scientific inquiry would be:  Does population affect the amount of radon found in houses?  (Whatever your thoughts on that, hold your horses.)  And our experiment would consist of this:  We would buy six radon detector kits (which couldn’t have been cheap—a quick search just brought up some that were $15 each) and we would send them to six different homes, three in large cities and three in small towns, and compare the results.  I think our hypothesis was that larger cities would have more radon than small towns and I am sure that we furrowed our brows and nodded at this a lot.

I’ll spare you the boring details.  None of the houses contained radon.  Or at least, four of them for sure did not.  We never even received two of the tests back.  (I think we sent them to distant relatives and other disinterested subjects.  These were the days before email and free long distance calling, so it was much harder back then to pester people into sending you their radon levels.)  

Although the absence of radon should have been good news for our friends and family, we were disappointed.  In conclusion, our results were inconclusive.   However, that did not stop us—none of the aforementioned absurdity stopped us—from winning second place in the school science fair.  That’s right.  I’ve got a certificate somewhere to prove it.

You see, the thing was… there were only three projects entered that year in the field of environmental chemistry… and the third one must have been pretty bad.  I’m sure the judges felt just as awkward handing over that prize ribbon as we did receiving it.  To this day, Michele and I still laugh over the ridiculousness of our project and our prestigious ranking.  We both remember clearly the judge at the fair asking us, after hearing our explanation of our graphs and findings, “So… what made you think that population would have anything to do with radon levels?”  I think I let Michele fake and blush her way through that embarrassing answer. 

The radon farce was my final appearance at the science fair, which is probably for the best.  In high school, I took Anatomy, where Michele and I partnered up once again to dissect a cat (something I handled very well since once you get the skin off it really doesn’t look like a cat) and then AP Chemistry, where I relied on my friend Bruce to get me through the labs and equations.  (Coincidentally, Bruce spent most of his “free” time in class placing the six-inch metal rulers on the hot plates until they became malleable enough to stretch a millimeter or two before tossing them back in the drawer.  Yeah.  If you failed your Chemistry lab final at Richardson High School after the year 1995 and don’t know why, maybe now you do. )

Between antics my prankster friend helped me come to the right conclusions in my experiments and stay “PH-balanced”.  (There you go Bruce, there’s a little inside joke for you since I ratted you out about the rulers.)  I won’t go into the silly “PH-balanced” reference here, but it has to do with a guest teacher we had when our regular teacher was out on maternity leave.  This guy was very enthusiastic about his life choices and he told us that if we were not devoting our careers to science, we were wasting our lives.  Since I had already decided to be either an English teacher or a writer, he lost all my respect in that moment.  Enter Bruce.  He could listen to this freak, stretch rulers, and help me with my homework all at the same time.  And his ability to multi-task got me through AP Chemistry.

But none of these stories, as entertaining or as shocking as they may be, can compare to my dad’s science fair experiences.  Because, back in 1953, good ol’ Dad blew up the fifth grade.

(To be continued…)

Confessions of a Former Teacher #1: I Stole the Baby!

[Ok, first of all, the last part of the title should be read in the voice of the brownie in the movie Willow.  If you missed that on the first read, try again.  If you don’t know what I’m talking about (sigh heavily) then check out this clip before reading: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=keKbt3dyXhA ]

As you know by now, I have quit teaching.  And now that the dust has settled a little… the three-hole punch is packed away and the glue has dried on the “about me” collages…  I feel it’s time to let you all in on a few choice secrets from my thirteen-year career.  Prepare to gasp.

This first shocking tale of mayhem comes from my very first semester as a teacher.  I was twenty-three years old and teaching 7^th grade language arts in Cedar Park, TX.  And I warn you, there are so many things wrong with this story, your judgmental brain won’t even know where to begin.

Let me set the scene.

It’s December.  The chilly Texas air keeps threatening to drop below 40°F.  It’s nine school days before the holiday break.  The students are restless.  The teachers are restless.  Tacky Christmas sweaters are being donned with no irony at all.  And then, quite suddenly, it appears in the break room:  a nativity scene made out of chocolate.

Chocolate Nativity Scene.  Just as you pictured it.

I don’t know who brought it.  I never heard anyone say a word about it.  But there it was.  Every day as I ate my homemade peanut butter sandwich or my cafeteria-bought chicken nuggets, out of the corner of my eye, hovering in my periphery, making a comfortable nest in the back of my mind, it was there.  Milk chocolate Mary.  Juicy Joseph. Scrumptious shepherd. Cocoa camel.  Mouth-watering wise men.  And that sweet, savory morsel—baby Jesus himself.

Every day for two weeks, I walked past this gaudy display and three thoughts occurred simultaneously to my brain.  Is a nativity scene really allowed in a public school?  Isn’t it kinda sacrilegious to cast our Lord and Savior in chocolate?  Why can’t I stop salivating? 

Every day for two weeks, it sat there, getting a little drier, a little more chalky in appearance, a wise man or two wilting just a bit.  Taunting me.

And then school was out for the holidays.  Students fled the campus, half-eaten candy canes hanging from their smile-stretched mouths.  Teachers sped away in their sensible sedans, the gleam of freedom shining in their eyes like starlight.  The campus would be a ghost town for two full weeks.

Except…

Two days after school let out, my Crazy Cousin Kelley came to visit me.  And she brought along her friend Matt.  And, proud new teacher that I was, I wanted to show them where I worked. 

Matt, Crazy Cousin Kelley, Me

Since the tour of my classroom (an extremely unimpressive space in a portable building with chalk boards and fake wood paneling) only took about a minute and half, I decided to wow them with a trip into the school building itself.  I showed them the rows of maroon lockers and pointed inside locked classrooms at the dry erase boards.  (Look!  Look at the fancy stuff the INDOOR teachers get!)  I pointed at posters advertising upcoming dances and demonstrated how my key unlocked both computer labs AND faculty restrooms, and my fans oohed and ahhed appropriately.

After I showed them the cafetorium (a fantastical place where people can both eat fish sticks AND enjoy off-key choir performances) and pointed out my favorite sign in the whole school (handwritten, hanging over the gym door, proudly proclaiming Do Not Take Balls Out—good advice by the way), we finally found ourselves in the break room.  And IT was still there.  In the rush to disperse at the last bell of the year, the chocolate nativity had been forgotten.

And, come on, from that point on it was really a no-brainer. 

The heavenly dessert

So, yes, Crazy Cousin Kelley and I stole the baby chocolate Jesus from the candy nativity scene in the break room of the middle school where I taught.  Matt, bless his pious little heart, cannot be blamed.  He tried to talk us out of it.  He said it wasn’t right.  And later, when the conquest was complete and Kelley and I indulged in our very guilty pleasure Matt adamantly refused to participate.  His soul remained pure.  His teeth remained free of the devilish brown stain left by the sweet baby Jesus.

However, my Crazy Cousin and I were beyond reasoning.  Satan had a hold of our taste buds and he wasn’t letting go.  We barely made it to the parking lot before we had to satisfy our craving and taste our victory.  And our victory tasted like… a two-week-old piece of chocolate that had been sitting out in the germ-infested air of a school.  Ah well.  We were in our twenties.  Our immune systems were strong.

The first sacri-licious bite

After the giddy drive home, Cousin Kelley and I celebrated our baby-Jesus-stealing in the obvious way:  we wrote a song about it.  Borrowing the tune (and quite a few of the lyrics) from REM, we commemorated our triumph with a ballad.  The lyrics are found below.  [Beware:  Once you read them, you may never be able to listen to “Losing My Religion” in the same way again.  So, if you wish not to sully that sacred musical experience, I suggest you use the utmost restraint and stop after the next paragraph.]

So there you have it.  Confession #1.  The sweet, caring, hard-working young woman you trusted to educate the next generation is nothing more than a thief, a heretic, a baby Jesus eater.  It feels good to admit it.

“Losing Our Religion”

Lyrics by Carie and Kelley

Music stolen from REM

[Note:  I have no doubt that I could do better than this today.  I believe my musical spoof skills have improved considerably in the past thirteen years.  But I am resisting the urge to revise.  This is the song, unchanged, as it was written in December of 1999.  Don’t hate.]

Oh Christ, is smaller

Smaller when molded

Into chocolate

The lengths that I would go to

To see it in bite size

Oh no, I've said too much

I set it up

That's me in the break room

That's me in the bright light

Stealing baby chocolate Jesus

Trying to sneak it out with you

And I don't know if I can do it

Oh no, I've said too much

I haven't said enough

I thought that I felt it melting

I shouldn’t be doing this thing

I think I heard Matt start to cry

With every swallow

I’m waiting to devour

I'm losing to temptation

Trying to keep my mind off it

Like a hungry and sinful fool, drool

Oh no, I've said too much

I set it up

Consider this

Consider this

Jesus is calling to me

Consider this

 I bit

It brought me to my knees

STALE

Now my whole theology has

Crashed to the ground

Now I've bit too much

 "STALE!"

I bet that it was fattening

I shouldn’t have eaten this thing

I think if asked I will deny

I wish it was a dream

CHOCOLATE NATIVITY SCENE

That's me in the break room

That's me in God’s light

Stealing baby chocolate Jesus

Trying to sneak it out with you

And I know now that I can do it

Oh no, I've said too much

I think I’ve said enough

I bet that it was fattening

I shouldn’t have eaten this thing

I think if asked I will deny

I wish it was a dream

Try, die, cry, why

CHOCOLATE NATIVITY SCENE

Caused a scene

Just a scene, seen