Hands On The Ground

"There's a hand on the floor."

Okay. Perhaps my students aren't always sitting in their chairs, feet flat on the floor, hands folded on spotless, shiny desks, waiting to greet me with, "Hello, Mrs. Hillbilly Mom." I am not Miss Landers. No student of mine will invite me over for dinner, and grab my bare elbow with two fingers to escort me to the patio where his dad, Ward, is grilling burgers.

But neither are my students rowdy, East End toughs who taunt me into boxing them until I knock the stuffing out of one, so at the end of the year a girl named Lulu sings, "To Mrs. Hillbilly Mom, with Love." My classroom is no Blackboard Jungle. If I must leave the room for a couple of minutes, I do not return to a Lord of the Flies society.

Normally, I run a tight ship, but more cruise-like than Navy-like (though I could SO take over their old slogan of, "It's not just a job, it's an adventure.") Consequently, it was a bit disconcerting to hear, "There's a hand on the floor." Made me look. Had somebody been dismembered while I was distracted by a kid asking me to feel his butt?

It was a paper hand, cut out for somebody's science project display board. The blue hand rested under a desk, until the girl nearest it picked it up and chucked it at a boy. Ain't that the way of the world? Girls picking up hands, and chucking them at boys willy-nilly, just to get attention? I quickly put an end to the handsiness.

We then got down to the business of eating Play-Doh cookies. That's what they tasted like, anyway. And smelled like. I don't know what the ingredients were, but I'm hoping to find out next week during project presentations. Even the 'good' cookies were not very good. They looked like crackers.

We really could have used them yesterday, with the homemade over-roasted peanut butter.