Friday, March 4, 2011

Even Steven, Now Hear This!

Because Even Steven rules my world, I would be remiss in assuming that yesterday's good fortune might stand alone. So I will now balance my universe by reporting other events of the previous day, which might sway the cosmos and re-establish even keel to Hillmomba.

Silly Mrs. Hillbilly Mom! One would think she just fell off the turnip truck, expecting her students to blindly follow directions like so many prairie cut-out children listening attentively to Miss Beadle in the Walnut Grove one-room schoolhouse. Mrs. HM foolishly supposed that the ground rules established over the past three quarters of the school year would still apply. That the enumerated proclamations of her Never Ever List would remain in effect. But that's not what happens when you give freshmen a stopwatch, a ruler, and a box of dominoes. A day older and a day wiser, HM allows you a peek into...

Mrs. Hillbilly Mom's Never Ever List Addendum

*Never, ever impale your allotted see-through plastic ruler on a pencil and turn it into a helicopter.

*Never, ever take a perfectly-working stopwatch and swing it by the lanyard, like a flapper might fling her beads, especially when you carelessly let it fly into the wall, resulting in a stopwatch that won't stop, which is kind of frowned-upon in the stopwatch world.

*Never, ever use the dominoes that you should be lining up on end in order to topple them and calculate speed in centimeters per second as building blocks for you own personal, colorful Stonehenge.

*Never, ever use Mrs. Hillbilly Mom's see-through plastic rulers as swashbuckling blades in an illicit classroom swordfight.

*Never, ever use your group's designated see-through plastic ruler to whack yourself repeatedly on the forehead.

*Never, ever swing the lanyard on your stopwatch in the manner of a slow, ineffective (though environmentally friendly) classroom weedeater.

*Never, ever put your mouth on the whistle that is attached to the lanyard of the stopwatch that Mrs. Hillbilly Mom had to borrow from Arch Nemesis because one of hers was mysteriously broken, because for all you know, the previous whistle-blower might have had oozing chancre sores on the lips (and if you don't know what a chancre sore is, you should pay closer attention during your health class instead of asking the guest speaker wildly inappropriate questions).

*Never, ever dangle your stopwatch and swing it back and forth in an effort to hypnotize a member of another group into not realizing what a ginormous pest you have become.

*Never, ever use the see-through plastic ruler that Mrs. Hillbilly Mom so lovingly loaned to you as a drumstick on a box of textbooks which rests upon an off-limits table.

*Never, ever expect to be congratulated and rewarded for confessing that you just broke a see-through plastic ruler, one of a 30-ruler set, not some cheap Devil's Playground knock-off, by reaching over to measure the dominoes, but accidentally catching the other end of the ruler on your foot, which caused the see-through plastic ruler to bend severely, and then snap.

There. That should provide for no whammies for Mrs. Hillbilly Mom.

3 comments:

knancy said...

Newmentia DoNots wielding rulers
sound a lot like stupid little preschoolers.

I say scores in behavior should hold some back in moving forward for forever.

Glad to see you addressed Even Steven,
Was afraid there for awhile your future days were heading to "hell" instead of to "heaven".

PossumManor said...

Never use the word "hard" in front of a ninth grade class, as the boys will giggle until they fall out of their desks.

Never tell a ninth grade class that the purpose of the assignment is twofold, as they will spend the next ten minutes trying to fold their papers.

Teaching ninth graders is never boring. It might be exhausting, but it is never boring.

Hillbilly Mom said...

knancy,
Well, I AM planning to open my own handbasket factory, just in case.


PossumManor,
Our industrial arts teacher has the same problem with 'wood'.

I make my students read the chapter out loud. At the beginning of the year, I write their names on index cards, and draw them out to read a paragraph.

Wednesday, we read about the different kinds of friction, how some is needed and some is unwanted. Woe was the child whose name was drawn to read the paragraph about lubricants.