noodlenose, or how johnny got his groove on
This is probably my favorite story, and I love telling it--so when a friend recently asked me to write it up (she's going to use it in a talk for new teachers) I told her I'd just post it to my blog. Here goes:
It was my second year teaching; I'd survived the first year of teaching seventh grade intact and thus had a posse of eigth graders who regularly stopped by and ate lunch in my room. One, always the center of some sort of attention (whether clowning or flirting) was *Johnny B*--the sort of 8th grader who will turn into a high school super-star: nice, athletic, cute, and smart enough to get the teacher to play around with his jokes. He also was the center of the funniest 10 teaching-minutes of my life when he came bolting into my class, head in the air, fingers pinching his nose shut.
This is all I heard:
"Mttth S, Mttth S...I haf a nooble ub by dose!"
It was all I could do to ask him to unplug his nose so he could repeat himself--
And then it got even better...
"Miss S! Miss S! I have a noodle up my nose and it's tickling my brain!
At this point, in true teacher form, I lost it. Of course, at the same time I had also handed him a tissue and told him to blow his nose. After a few minutes, he finally owned up to the origin of the dread noodle. He (and a few friends, when do they do anything alone?) had been sucking noodles up one nostril and pulling them out the other. Inevitably, one of them broke and started to tickle Johnny's brain.
The topic for my friend's talk? You want to teach middle school--where else does stuff like this happen?
Gotta love it.
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