the view from the front of the room…

Today my sixth period class had to take a test. It’s a class full of upperclassmen and half of them are seniors. We have had lots of cases of senioritis over the past few weeks. As a result, the students in this particular class have been receiving a little bit more slack than I usually give. I know that they are having trouble staying motivated since they have already completed enough of the year to graduate. At this point they are coasting through the last few weeks of the semester.

Anyway, I passed out the test and the class was beautifully quiet (a rare occurrence among high strung teenagers). I could hear the pencils scratching over the paper and I could feel the palpable tension as my students sweated over this chapter, which they probably forgot to study.

Then, with the sudden force of a radio coming on as a car starts, a cellphone rang. The owner of the cellphone looked up at me with that deer-in-the-headlights look of sheer panic. But in a flash she had wiped the panic off of her face and she started coughing loudly to cover the jazzy music coming from her purse. Her classmates, who had all turned to stare, recognized the gesture and like a chorus from a Shakespearean play, they all chimed in with their coughing too.

It was the most hilarious thing I have ever seen. Fifteen students sat coughing with all the strength they could muster. It all happened in the briefest flash of time. They banded together so quickly and so forcefully that I couldn’t contain my laughter. I desperately tried to pull together a straight face. Then, as quickly as it had started, it was all over. The girl patted her throat and announced that she must have had one of those “extremely contagious 2 minute bugs.”

I was too amused to take the phone away from her. I simply pretended that nothing out of the ordinary had happened at all.

Update: The next day, during sixth period, my phone rang unexpectedly. I recognized the sound and at the same instant a brilliant idea invaded my brain. I started coughing as loudly as possible and I walked over behind my desk to pull out my ringing phone. The whole class stared at me while I made a fool out of myself, but I continued undaunted with my obnoxious coughing, all while fiddling with my phone. After I had silenced it, I cleared my throat, walked back to the center of the room and looked them seriously in the face before saying, “I must have had that same two minute bug that y’all had yesterday.”

I tell you what, they DIED laughing. It was fabulous. Then the questions started chiming in. “But Mrs. Citystreams, I thought you didn’t realize it!” “Did you know who’s phone it was?”

I walked over to the guilty girl’s desk and said, “of course I knew that it was your phone!” They were so shocked. It seems that they think me either really stupid or really deaf.