Oblivious

Kid asks for the question worksheet because he was absent yesterday. Fine, I give him one, and he returns to his seat near the front of the room.

After a couple of minutes I notice from my perch at my podium that I had given him the wrong sheet, one for a comletely different class. So I wait for him to raise his hand to tell me.

Well, genius spends the entire period staring off into space, and never notices he has the wrong paper on his desk. Never lifts a pencil to write down the answers we're all recording; never even glances down in mild curiosity at the paper lying untouched and half-covered by a limp hand. He's just waiting for the bell to ring.

The bell. He robotically jams the paper into his bag, and heads for the door, pulling his pants down under his arse as he passes out of the room.

Sigh . . .

With Apologies to Carol King

You came in late this morning with a pass to class,
There's something fishy here, your writing's smooth as glass,
And I don't think you know just what those big words mean.

Well it's too late, Baby, now it's too late,
Though I really did try to grade it;
When you brought me this late work you lied, and I tried,
But I can tell it's not yours: you faked it.

I can tell by your margins and the odd font size
This isn't your effort, you've plagiarized;
And I don't want to do it,
But a Referral is what you need.

Well it's too late, Baby, now it's too late,
the quarter term ends today,
You can't sleep in your seat three months
Then turn your sorry D to an A.

Is This Going to Be On the Test?

Yes, Robert: that's why I'm talking about it now.

Maybe you ought to write this down.

The Crack in the Dyke

I found a paper airplane in the teachers' lounge this morning.

Bad sign.

Little cracks of instability like this, early in the year, can turn into giant fissures in our sanity well before Christmas Break.

I'm keeping my eyes open.

I Got the Four-Wheel Blues

Okay, so my car is fifteen years old, and is approaching 150,000 miles.

It's given great service since day one, so I really have nothing to complain about. That Farfergnugen company makes a good product.

But the writing is on the wall. It didn't want to start this morning: cranked happily on a year-old battery, but no firing.

When I turned the key off, there would be a little firing, just enough to shake the engine a bit, so I began just releasing the key from the Start position to let it snap back to the On position, hoping it would catch.

After the fourth try, running the starter fifteen seconds or so without a hint of firing, I let the key snap back to the On position, and she fired up.

Odd, that.

I stopped at the store on the way to work, and when I got back in the car, she started immediately: I couldn't even hear the starter because the engine fired up so quickly.

Funny thing, but maybe she's getting to the place where I shouldn't be letting it sit the weekend without starting the engine. Usually she gets only an occasional Saturday off, but yesterday I slept in and didn't make it to church. That two days was just too long, I guess.

Yup, she's getting old, and I have to adjust. I think I'll drop by AAA, and see how much it is to join, to get the towing. It'd be nice to just pull the card and my cell phone out of my pocket if the car decides to take a nap in the street. I can't imagine how much it would cost to hire a tow truck to drag that worthless carcass my pride and joy across town to my mechanic.

I'm seeing the signs, and now I'm worried. I'll still drive my little wreck, but in the meantime, I'm going to be considering what I want my next car to be.