Anticipating a roomful of glazed-eyed kids who don't give a rat's turd about what the difference between an adverb and adjective is enough to make me wake up in cold sweat. Grammar is meticulous, difficult, and tedious for both parties-it's too bad that I have to fake a passion for it.
So on the day that I gear myself up to teach a grammar lesson, a couple of guys from the local Pest Control Center drop by and start working in the classroom right next to me. It all began when the next door teacher and I smelled that sulfuric, nose-hair curdling stench-we knew that we'd been skunked. However, it turned out to be more serious than a late night, drive by shooting by that devious nocturnal critter. The smell was getting increasingly worse until we figured that the skunk has wedged itself under our bungalow and decided to lay its furry head to rest there forever.
The teacher next door had already evacuated his nose-pinched students out of the stinky classroom, but my classroom thankfully didn't smell as horribly. The problem was, however, that my students were finding the de-skunking much more exciting than my grammar lesson. My lesson didn't stand a chance against the scraping, sawing, and eventual shouting from the workers next door such as, "We've got it, we've got it!" "Oh my gawd!" "It's been dead for awhile now!!!"
At this point, with students begging me to let them out early so they could witness the exhuming of the skunk, I used the poor dead skunk as a bribe. "Ok, whoever finishes their work, I will release you in groups of 4 to check out what's happening next door." Never did I witness such determination. Kids who never do their work finished early as their friends yelled out, "Hey, save me a spot!"
And I must admit, in that moment, I was envious of the skunk because I would've killed to have that many kids interested in what I had to show them.
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