First of all, my new life, or better stated renewed life, as Mr. Bates rocks (at least from my perspective - students, parents and administrators may argue otherwise, but I'm loving my teaching job - now I just hope I can keep it.)
Last Friday (Oct. 30th) the day before Halloween, with half the school dressed in costumes and with my English students coming to my class straight off a Thriller pep assembly, I decided to make a quick judgement call... switch plans for writing paragraphs on the Holocaust in the writing lab to Halloween Jokes and Draconian Pick-up lines in my classroom. After all, if our language isn't to help us laugh and woo and find love, then what a waste of a language.
I'm big on atmosphere, so I killed the lights, shut the windows, got some music pumping thru my surround sound, and found and old flickery black and white Frankenstein movie on YouTube to project on my wall. I happened to have our industrial strength smoke machine in the car and thought - why not? I greeted students with music blaring, smoke billowing and me bellowing through my classroom mic, "Whaahhhhh hahhhh ha hahhhh... Welcome to English helllllllll! Whaahhhhhh hahhhhh ha hahhhhhh... I had students (and a few teachers) from all over the English wing sticking their heads in to see what was going on.
The bell rang, I toned down the music and started into my spiel on the language of laughter and wooing ...
We started talking about the craft of joke writing and I was working down my list of 21 duck jokes I wrote for my daughter, Piper. Each time I told a new joke I'd hit the smoke button as a sort of ba-dum-bum after the punchlines. I got to number seventeen: Why shouldn't you ever tell a duck a secret?
By this point the fog was so thick that students had opened the windows and door, and smoke was pouring out into the parking lot and hallway. There was so much smoke you could barely see across the classroom. Still I couldn't resist... When I hit the punchline, Because they always quack under pressure, I hit the smoke button and as expected more smoke and droll laughter poured into the building.
Then came the unexpected: a heart-stopping shrill-pitched pulse and flashing red light cut through the mists of darkness and froze the entire room. In fact, for an instant the entire student body and school community froze. 1500 mouths stopped moving and hearts stopped beating. With a punch line, a puff of smoke and an invisible trigger, I had inadvertently silenced them all. It was a perfectly pregnant pause.
From my precarious position of the incident's epicenter I'm fairly certain I was the first to breathe and when I did I expired with two syllables that set the whole Logan High universe spinning into chaos...
"Oh, sh....t!"
An explosion of laughter roared out of my classroom, out the windows and down the hall, and in an instant adrenaline and bedlam raced through the hallowed halls of the school!
In a flash I was thru my students and out my door. The scene in the hallways was like a disaster film. Silhouettes of students racing in all directions through a dusty fog of smoke. Befuddled teachers misdirecting their students from one wrong exit to the other.
I was in deep sh...moke! In my enthusiasm for my cheeky punchlines and the untapped potential of laughter and love in the English language, I had filled the entire English wing with smoke.
As students poured out around me, I choked back into the eye of the storm and dove for my desk phone. I followed my shaky finger down the emergency phone list taped to my file cabinet and punched in the office extension. Someone said hello and I blubbered out an explanation about smoke and laughter and love, oh yeah, and the fire alarm that might actually be a false alarm that might just trace back to my room and a malfunctioning smoke machine... and I hung up as quickly as possible.
As the smoke settled and students returned to their classes, and I did my best to settle my class back to order and get on with the serious business of the day... writing Halloween jokes and Draconian pick-up lines, the reports started trickling in. One of my students had been in the lunch room, "They shut the whole place down. They put down the iron curtains and stopped serving food and everything." From a student passing through the lobby, "The special ed kids were all going wild..."
From the administration, so far nothing.
Inside my head, two syllables keep echoing, "Oh..."
A aside: It's Monday morning as I'm writing this and mid-entry the fire inspector came into my room looking for a fire alarm that was tripped on Friday... I haven't yet heard from the administration, but I'm guessing they won't be far behind the fire inspector. In defense I'm going to send them back to my job application packet where I spell out my philosophy on education (which is featured earlier in this blog) and remind them that it's not my fault they didn't see the smoke coming - after all, as the old saying goes, "Where's there's smoke, there's fire." Only in this case, there was really only smoke that wasn't even really smoke.
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