See Sally…? Wait a minute! Why don’t I remember Sally?
Did Dick forget to feed Spot and Spot was forced to kill and eat Sally?
No… I had Dick and Jane books in Kiddy-garter and they did have Sally in them. And Spot never killed anyone. But with all the running she did, Sally did not do anything memorable. If my teacher, Miss Ketchum, had told the Spot eats Sally story, I’m sure I would’ve remembered Sally better and learned to read faster.
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But I actually did learn to read faster because there was a Cat in the Hat, and a Yertle the Turtle, and because Horton the elephant heard a Who, and a Grinch stole Christmas. Yes, humor is what always did it for me in the classroom. Dr. Seuss taught me to read. Miss Mennenga taught me to read out loud. And in seventh grade, Mr. Hickman taught me to appreciate really really terrible jokes. And those are the people who twisted my arm… er, actually my brain… enough to make me be a teacher who taught by making things funny. There were kids who really loved me, and principals who really hated me. But I had students come back to me years later and say… “I don’t remember anything at all from my classes in junior high except when you read The Outsiders out loud and did all those voices, and played the Greek myth game where we had to kill the giants with magic arrows, and the stupid jokes you told.” High praise indeed!
I think that teaching kids to laugh in the classroom was a big part of teaching them how to use the language and how to think critically. You find what’s funny in what you learn, and you have accidentally examined it carefully… and probably etched it on the stone part of your brain more memorably than any other way you could do it. And once it’s etched in stone, you’re not getting that out again any time soon.
Humor makes you look at things from another point of view, if for no other reason, then simply because you are trying to make somebody laugh. For instance, do you wonder like I do why the Cat in the Hat is trying to pluck the wig off of Yelling Yolanda who is perched on the back of yellow yawning yak? I bet you can’t look at those two pictures positioned like that and not see what I am talking about. Of course, I am not betting money on it. I am simply talking Iowegian… a totally different post.
But the point is, humor and learning go hand in hand. It takes intelligence to get the joke. Joking makes you smarter. And that is why the class clowns in the past… the good and funny ones… not the stupid and clueless ones… were always my favorite students.
Yes, I admit it. I am a goofy old coot and an embarrassment to my children.
That’s my role in life now. Eye rolls abound when I am around.
There are several reasons why, which I intend to list here in detail in order to embarrass my children further. But it basically boils down to the fact that I am a writer, and though I write mostly fiction, another way of saying I lie a lot, a real writer tends to reveal more of the naked truth about himself than a child can stand.
Who wants to see their father naked? Especially when he is old… wrinkled, spotty, and mostly fish-belly white.
Speaking of nakedness, one of the things that my children are most embarrassed about is the fact that I know a lot about nudists and naturists, in fact, I know many real nudists, and I have been nude in at least one social situation with other naked nudists. And, even worse, I admit it in writing where my children and their friends can see it. Of course, none of them read this blog anymore for that reason.
I have written novels where there are nudist characters based on some of the real nudists I have known. The novels with nudist characters in them so far are, Recipes for Gingerbread Children, The Baby Werewolf, Superchicken, The Boy… Forever, and A Field Guide to Fauns. And these novels might not embarrass them so much if they read them to discover that the novels have something to say that really isn’t about their father being a crazy naked coot. But they won’t read them because I am embarrassing to them.
And there is the verified fact that I am something of a conspiracy theorist. I firmly believe that the actor/theater owner William Shakespeare only offered his name to the real writer of Shakespeare’s plays and poetry, the 17th Earl of Oxford, Edward DeVere. There is actual evidence that is so, though it was a secret that DeVere took to his pauper’s grave after spending away his entire family estates and fortune. A pauper’s grave that no interested scholar can find the location of to this very day, although maybe he’s buried in the same place of honor as the actor/theater owner, as there are cryptic clues to that as well.
I also believe that Dwight Eisenhower met with alien civilizations in the 1950s and the Roswell Incident was a real crash of more than one spacecraft from other star systems. There exist real deathbed confessions that confirm those details, and the government has been covering up the facts for decades.
The conspiracy-theory skills I have as a crazy, embarrassing coot have resulted in books like Catch a Falling Star, Stardusters and Space Lizards, and the Bicycle-Wheel Genius.
And lastly, I was a school teacher in middle schools and high schools for thirty-one years, which means I can create kid-characters in fiction that are very realistic and have a good-but-comic quality that make readers generally like my stories.
So, my children are probably right to be seriously embarrassed by my very existence. Of course, I, like all old coots registered with the Crazy, Embarrassing Coots of America, the CECA, am totally immune to being embarrassed by the embarrassment of my children.
Today’s Art-Day Saturday post is about the pictures I have drawn to establish in my mind the characters that make up the fictional world of Norwall, Iowa. Specifically, the kids in my YA novels.
Milt Morgan, wizard of the Norwall Pirates
I do manage character development and detailed descriptions by creating early on a picture of what the character looks like for me.
Sherry Cobble, nudist, twin sister of Shelly, also a nudist
Mike Murphy and his girlfriend, Blueberry BatesEdward-Andrew Campbell
Brent Clarke, first leader of the Norwall Pirates
Dilsey Murphy, everybody’s big sister
Torrie Brownfield, the Baby Werewolf
Grandma Gretel Stein, Todd Niland, Sherry Cobble, Sandy WickhamFrancois Martin, the Sad Clown who Sings
Anita Jones, the girlfriend of Superchicken
Valerie Clarke, the most beautiful girl ever born in Norwall
Bobby and his book were perched in the rocking chair on the porch with Horatio curled up on the rug by his feet. The reading lamp was on, but otherwise the porch was mostly dark. Dad and Grandpa had finished closing the porch-window shutters over an hour earlier. Thunder rumbled eerily somewhere out in the dark of the early evening.
“It sure is spooky out there,” said Shane from his seat in the darkness around the porch sofa.
“It’s just a summer thunderstorm,” said Bobby, turning a page.
“Whatcha readin’?”
“Sherlock Holmes.”
“Oh? What’s the story called?”
“The Final Problem.”
“Is that a good one?”
“No. Sherlock fights Professor Moriarty at a waterfall in Switzerland called Reichenbach Falls. They both go over the edge and fall to their deaths.”
“Sherlock dies?” Shane sounded genuinely alarmed.
“Yeah. But he’s not real. And he comes back to life. The Hound of the Baskervilles happens after this story.”
“Oh.” Shane sounded relieved.
Then the place was briefly white with light from outside, and the thunderstrike that followed almost instantly meant that lightning had hit something nearby. ProbaHbly the lightning rod on the barn’s cupola.
But Bobby and Shane both jumped as the electricity went out, leaving them in inky blackness. A few seconds later, the lights were on again.
“What was that!?” Shane practically screeched.
“From the ozone smell in the air, I surmise that lightning struck nearby. Close enough to cause a brief power outage via electromagnetic pulse.” Horatio looked calm and unconcerned as he said it.
“Horatio says that the lightning struck the barn and caused the electricity to go out for a moment.”
“Oh.”
“I don’t wish to alarm anyone, but I smell rats out and about,” said Horatio.
“Professor Rattiarty?” asked Bobby.
“What?” said Shane.
“Yes, but not alone. He has the corpse of a poisoned rat with him. Possibly Darktail Ralph. He probably wants to tempt me to poison myself.”
“You won’t eat the dead rat, will you?”
“No! Yuck! I don’t want to eat any dead rats!” remarked Shane loudly and with disgust.
“I concur with your brother. I will not be eating any rats tonight either. Rattiarty is himself filled with rat poison.”
“What? Rattiarty is poisoned but not dead?”
“What… what?” gasped Shane. “Are you talking to Horatio again?”
“Rats often ingest poison slowly enough that, instead of slaying them, they become immune to it.”
“What are we gonna do if the rats are now immune to poison?”
“They are? Bobby? What is Horatio telling you?”
“What are you telling me, Horatio?”
“Professor Rattiarty is out there now in the storm. He’s out of evil minions and wants to challenge me to a final battle.”
“Horatio says Professor Rattiarty wants a final showdown now.”
“The evil rat is out there in the storm?”
“He is.”
“Bobby, if you open the porch door for me, I must answer the rat’s challenge.”
“Now? In the storm?”
“Yes. If not now, then never. My aged body is soon to give out, and I would not let that evil rat continue to threaten the Niland family that I have loved for so long, and who loves me in return.”
Bobby put Sherlock Holmes aside and rose from the rocking chair.
“Bobby, why are you crying? What did the dog say?”
“Not now, Shane.”
Bobby moved to the porch door. He opened the screen door inward and the storm door outward against the wind and the driving rain.
“Bobby! What are you doing?”
Horatio leaped up and bolted out of door as a lightning strike illuminated everything with a burning blue-white light.
Bobby thought he saw the rat scampering across the farmyard as the light faded to blackness.
Shane, terrified, jumped out into the downpour.
“Horatio! Come back, doggie!”
Bobby, too, went out in the rain. Straining his eyes to try to find Horatio and the rat he was chasing. He could see nothing. A car out on the gravel country road had its brights on as it barrelled along towards Highway 69 going much faster than it should in the rain.
“Horatio! Come back, it’s not safe!” Shane screamed, crying as he shouted it.
Grandpa Butch was suddenly directly behind Bobby.
“What’s going on? Why are you boys out in the storm?”
“It’s Horatio and the rat.”
“Shane! Come back to the house!”
“Grandpa, Horatio is out here in the rain somewhere! Bobby let him out the front door!”
A car horn blared. Brakes screeched. Bobby thought he heard a sickening thump out there on the gravel road. And the car skidded to a stop in the dark and the rain.
“Oh, god, no! Shane!”
Grandpa ran toward the car. Bobby followed right behind. As they drew near the stopped car, they heard Shane crying as if he were heartbroken.
“Shane! Are you all right?”
“Grandpa, it’s Horatio.”
“Butch, I am sorry,” said Mr. Beetle Jones, out of the car and kneeling by the lump of soaked fur on the gravel road, illuminated by the headlights.
Bobby’s stomach quivered, leading to an uncontrolled string of chest-constricting sobs.
“Ah, Horatio. You have been a good and faithful friend,” said Butch Niland wearily as he kneeled down and petted the badly damaged body.
“Is he…? Is he dead?”
“I’m sorry, boys. He was an old dog. It is a blessing that it was over quickly. It means his life won’t end in prolonged suffering.”
“Bobby, how could you?” cried Shane. “It’s your fault! You and your dumb old imagination. You shoulda never let him out of that door.” Bobby could take no more. He lit out for the house as fast as he could run. The lightning and thunder lent drama and illuminated his path.
Bobby had always been amazed at the calm, easy-going way that Grandpa Butch handled a crisis. He had examined Horatio himself when he had first learned of the eating of a part of Whitewhiskers Billy’s poisoned corpse.
He had then called the vet in Belle City. They put a couple of soft but old blankets in the back of the red pickup and then driven Horatio to see his doggy-doctor while Bobby and Shane rode in the back to keep Horatio calm and safe.
The doctor had checked him over carefully, determining that the dog probably had not eaten enough of the poisoned rat to get any of the poison in his own system. So, they gave Horatio some precautionary anti-coagulant injections, induced some vomiting, forced a bit of activated charcoal into him, and then, knowing Horatio would be better tended back home at the Niland farm than he ever would be in the Belle City animal hospital, sent him home.
“So, they’re sure that Horatio’s not gonna die?” Shane asked on the ride back home.
“Pretty sure, yeah. It’ll be our job to make sure he doesn’t eat any more poisoned rats. And we have to tell Grandpa if he vomits again, or shows any more symptoms.”
“Yeah, that makin’ the dog vomit thing was sure icky.”
“But it got rid of any poison still in his stomach, Shane.”
Bobby put one hand on Shane’s shoulder as he continued to stroke the fur on Horatio’s neck with the other hand. Shane had both hands deeply buried in Horatio’s brown-and-white fur coat.
“So, did Professor Rattiarty win this round?” Shane asked.
“No, he didn’t,” said Horatio confidently. “He meant to kill me with this poison-eating ploy. And we made him fail.”
“Horatio said he didn’t because Horatio is still alive.”
“Oh, that’s good.”
*****
Rattiarty glared at Darktail Ralph.
“Don’t look at me. It isn’t my fault the damned dog didn’t eat enough of Billy to do the job!”
“Well, we just have to try again.”
“Not that way. There has to be some other plan. Something that works better.”
“This plan will work if you eat more of the poison. Saturate your system with toxins to make the dosage more lethal!”
“But there are only two of us left! Why should I be the one to sacrifice myself? Why don’t you let Horatio eat you? You have a lot more poison in you than I have in me.”
“It may come to that if you fail too.”
Ralph snarled at the Professor. “I won’t even try. You can’t make me do it!”
“We shall see about that.”
Rattiarty made the first lunge, going for Ralph’s throat.
Ralph was a veteran rat-warrior, however, and still very quick to dodge. He had the advantage of youth over Rattiarty, as the Professor was quite old for a rat.
As Rattiarty’s attempt at grabbing Ralph with teeth in his throat, the old rat’s superior strategy came into play. The lunge having missed, the Professor snagged the right nostril of Ralph’s nose with one claw. He ripped the skin all the way up to the Darktail’s right eye.
Blood half-blinded Ralph.
Rattiarty built on that advantage to swing his thin body up onto Darktail Ralph’s back. Stabbing rat teeth descended on Ralph’s neck, gouging into his spinal cord and effectively paralysing him. In mere moments more, the head was off, and Rattiarty was alone, but ready to drag the poison-filled body to some place where Horatio T. Dogg would see it and eat it.
“I love you, Horatio. You are my only true friend in the world.” Said Bobby while giving the old collie a tight hug around the neck.
“I may only be your brother, but I like to think I’m your friend too,” said Shane, sitting on the opposite side of Horatio.
“Well, yeah… but you’re the stinky little brother. That’s not the same as the kind of friend that a dog can be.”
“That is very true, a dog is faithful one hundred percent,” said Horatio. “But don’t forget. Shane is my boy too. All the members of your family are thoroughly and equally loved by your faithful dog and rat-detective.”
“Well, of course, that is true too,” said Bobby.
“What is? Are you talking to yourself again?” asked Shane.
“No. Answering Horatio.”
“Oh. Right. The talking dog.”
Bobby punched Shane on the shoulder behind Horatio’s back.
“Really, I find the dog to be the perfect person to tell all my troubles to too,” Shane continued. “But Horatio is not our only friend. There are others too.”
“You don’t see what it’s like in school. They pick on me constantly. That’s where the whole Bedwetter Bob nickname came from.”
“But Mike Murphy doesn’t call you that, does he?”
“Well, no… not frequently anyway.”
“And Blueberry Bates… she’s like your girlfriend almost.”
“No. She’s Mike’s girlfriend.”
“But you like her a lot, too… right?”
“Well, I…”
“And you saw her naked when you were both swans and you had to take the feathers off when you got back home.”
“No, I didn’t see her naked. Never did. Never would.”
“What? You had your clothes on under the swan feathers?”
“No, but… Well, we both sorta passed out when we got back home from that winter flight.”
“And you woke up with your clothes on?”
“Um… yeah.”
“Who put the clothes on your naked bodies?”
“No one did. Um, Blueberry says that probably it was maybe only our dream-selves, or maybe our astral bodies that turned into swans. And when we woke up, we were both back in our normal bodies.”
Shane grinned like he didn’t believe a word of it. Of course, there were a lot of things about the whole fairy-spell thing that didn’t ring completely true. Sometimes, when you tell yourself stories a lot, you may have convinced yourself that a good story was true even though, deep inside, you knew it wasn’t completely true.
“Why would it matter to you if I’ve seen Blueberry naked anyway?”
“Well, you know… she has… um… boy parts. I wonder what they look like.”
“You should never wonder about something like that. It’s her private business. And if I ever had the chance to look… well, I wouldn’t, okay?”
“Did you ever have the chance?”
“I don’t think so. But that doesn’t matter. She and Mike are my good friends. And he loves her. I can’t argue with that.”
“Even if you loved her too?”
“Even if… Wait! Now you’re invading my privacy!”
“Okay! Sorry… sorry.”
They didn’t talk for a few minutes. Bobby just glared at Shane. When Bobby looked away, he still didn’t say anything more.
“My, that was certainly tense,” said Horatio, blowing smoke rings from his imaginary pipe.
“I guess I do love her too… as a friend,” Bobby whispered.
“Of course, you do,” Shane answered softly.
“Look, I see a rat!” barked Horatio.
“Where?” asked Bobby.
“There!” said Shane, pointing.
It was apparently Whitewhiskers Billy. He was sorta stumbling through the yard like he was drunk or something.
“Rabies?“ asked Shane.
“Poison,” assured Bobby.
Horatio, in his eagerness to get the intruder, pushed hard through the screen door, and would have broken it if it didn’t luckily open outward instead of inward.
As speedy as Horatio had ever been for as long as they had known the old dog, he now closed on the fleeing rat and swatted it onto its back. Then he grabbed it by the throat, and he shook the life out of it
“Bobby, Grandpa poisoned the rats.”
“Yeah, so?”
“So, if he eats it, won’t he get poisoned too?”
In a flash, Bobby was out of the screen porch and out to where Horatio was dismembering Whitewhiskers Billy. The rat died with a snort. Bobby pulled Horatio off of most of what was left of the dead rat.
There was blood on Horatio’s muzzle. He swallowed something. Bobby dreaded to think of what it might have been.
It is located in the deepest, darkest place in the very heart of the barn. Underneath the pig-chow storage bin. Down where it smells like wet grain, festering and percolating with evil.
Professor Rattiarty, Whitewhiskers Billy, and Darktail Ralph were the only remaining rats in the gang. The cat was banished for now. And it was all right according to the ways of evil rats. You see, those three truly vile rodents had founded the gang, built the lair out of an old packing crate located under all the sacks of food and supplements. They had also all three participated in chewing out the tunnels through the wooden walls and sacks of feed.
“How do you know they built the place, Bobby? That’s not something that Horatio’s nose can tell by smell.” Shane squinted in mock suspicion.
“I just know it… okay? Horatio and me figured it all out a long time ago. Now, listen!”
Professor Rattiarty called the meeting to order with a snarl as the three were in a circle around the pan of strange green food that Darktail Ralph had discovered on the other side of a wall.
“It has the old grandfather’s smell on it. It is something he must’ve left in the barn,” said Ralph.
“Is it food? Can we eat it? Maybe it’s his lunch and he left it here for later,” said Billy.
“No, no. It is obviously poison,” said the Professor.
“How do you know? It smells like food,” said Ralph.
“Do you not smell something slightly off about it? It has a faint hint of strange potions they use around their wheeled things. It has the look and odor of things that proved to be poison before when the old man plotted against us.”
“Oh! In that case, we must not eat of it. Leave it where we discovered it. Maybe the old man will eat it himself.” Billy’s eyes sparkled as he knew he had to be right.
“The old man is not so dumb that he would ingest his own poison. He is much too careful for that. We just don’t eat it!” declared Ralph.
“Gentlerats, don’t misunderstand me… as you do so at your own peril… but we WILL partake of this poisonous food.”
“But why, Professor?” complained Billy.
“Because that is how we will defeat this trap. We ingest barely enough of it to make ourselves slightly sick. We will, in this way, make ourselves resistant to the poison over time. In fact, we made ourselves immune back in the old days.”
“But what if we get too much poison, by accident, say…?” Billy complained with hesitation.
“Then you will die a horrible, painful death,” sneered Ralph.
“But if you do make the mistake, dear William of the White Whiskers, you must drag yourself out of the barn where Horatio T. Dogg will smell you, pounce on you, and eat you.”
Ralph and the Professor both laughed. Billy was confused.
“Why do I let the dog eat me?”
“Because you will be full of poison in that case, and it will kill the dog,” sneered Ralph./
“Kill Horatio with the old man’s own poison!” crooned the Professor, his voice dripping with menace.
“Let’s dig in,” said Ralph.
“But slowly… carefully…” suggested the Professor. “You don’t want it to kill you if you can help it.”
“Very true,” said Ralph while crunching up the poison gingerly in his mouth.
“Ummm, this actually tastes good!” said Billy.
“Don’t eat it so fast you fool,” said the Professor.
“Wow!” said Shane to Bobby. “You tell that story like it was a cartoon show on TV.”
“Thanks, but it’s just the way Horatio told it to me,” said Bobby with a grin.
As a retired school teacher who retired for health reasons, I have a limit to how much I can teach. As I substitute, mostly for teachers who planned on being out for in-service training or special educational meetings, I can usually only do two jobs a week. That limits the number of kids you have contact with, especially the more gifted and talented sorts of kids. But that doesn’t really matter much. As a regular classroom teacher I always focused more on making connections with kids, especially the challenging ones. My two jobs this week consisted of sixth grade Science all day on Tuesday, and seventh grade AVID classes on Thursday.
Sixth graders are the rabid squirrel monkeys of the middle-school monkey-house. They are the ones who jump around the most, scream at each other the most, and swing from the light fixtures the most. And if you think of it as being only metaphorically true, you don’t really know much about sixth graders and modern education.
But the coach I was subbing for is very good at discipline. He gave them an article on the organ systems of the human body and told them to to use the annotation marks on his close-reading poster. Now, you and I both know that coaches don’t really walk sixth graders through note-taking and reading-comprehension drills regularly. There’s a reason coaches are more likely to teach Science, History, or even Math before taking on English or Language Arts teaching assignments.
So, I did a quick-teach using the two-page article on how to circle key words, underline main idea sentences, and how to do a SWBS (Somebody-Wanted-But-So Charts) analysis to summarize the article. They, of course, did not do that before in science class, or even in English that they could remember. I basically simplified his fifty-minute busy-work assignment into a simple twenty-minute reading assignment that would take the slow readers longer. So, I had to occupy the smart, quick, and evil kids with something else while I helped the stragglers finish. I drew a cartoon rabbit, a cartoon duck, and a Disney-esque Goofy on the white board, challenging them to copy it.
I got to work one-on-one with several slow readers. Xavier, a hyper, mouthy kid who had dyslexia was tickled pink to learn he could pick out and put together key words and main ideas. He was unable to write the summary, but he annotated correctly, possibly for the first time ever. And that was a break-through for him. I subbed with him in other classes where he was one of the awfullest chandelier swingers, so that connection made a huge difference for him for at least fifty minutes of his school life. Malik the Mouth who never does anything but insult the others, and gives somebody else’s name to the sub when he gets in trouble, actually kept his bargain with me from the last time he was baby-sat by me. He stayed in his seat and kept working all period. The only time I had to make him give me his name was at the end of class so I could leave a good-job note for the coach after class ended. I actually like those sorts of kids who other subs routinely blow up at and send out of class. Xavier and Malik (possibly not their actual names) are both a hoot to teach. And they help add to my list of funny classroom anecdotes when they lose control and get in trouble with me. I always try to turn those into teachable moments.
But when the coach came in at the end of his smartest class, saw everybody was done, and saw cartoons on his board, he got mad at them. I had to take the blame for them and explain why they were not simply blowing the assignment off and playing around. Coaches don’t usually understand that classroom learning can be fun.
Thursday I was subbing for AVID classes again. These are special classes where at-risk kids are put in college-prep courses and treated like gifted kids. The program is misused as a warehouse for failing discipline-problem kids by this school district. But the Field Middle School has their act together for this program. The kids were working with college-level education students as tutors, and had to fill out self-examination forms that evaluated how they were doing in working with their tutors.
These are well-trained, smart, and seriously funny kids. Xochitl (an Aztec name pronounced ZOACHIE for a Hispanic girl that I have suprisingly encountered more than once in Texas) was a giftred complainer and procrastinator who was too lazy to lift a pencil, yet did the actual work in a few short minutes when she finally got around to it. She had time to tell the kids at her table, one of the tutors, and me about a time when she knocked the head off of a cucaracha (a cockroach who speaks Spanish) and tried to wait for an entire day for it to finally die so she could pick it up and flush it. The thing is, a cockroach only needs its head to eat with and see with. It is perfectly fine otherwise until it starves to death or gets eaten by a rat. So, when she went to pick it up with salad tongs, it was still alive and wiggly. She pantomimed how she threw the thing across the kitchen in surprise, and when it landed in the sink, she nailed it with the garbage disposal. This girl is a gifted story-teller. She had us all laughing. And her school grades were all A’s and B’s.
I admit it. I love kids like that. They are the best things about teaching. And whether they are Aaargh! Sixth Graders! or Uggh! Seventh graders! (the chimpanzees of the middle-school monkey-house) I actually love them. (But PLEASE don’t tell them that!)
**Please note** This is a fiction story. It absolutely did not happen in real life. So, no real-life school administrators should be fired over it. And the author is a RETIRED school teacher, so it is not necessary to hire a hit man to protect future students from evil ideas like the ones presented in this story.
Rudy was miserable as he sat in the counselor’s office staring at the note from his teacher. Miss Nactarine. the sympathetic young counselor, sat behind her desk praying silently that the poor boy would be able to overcome his extreme shyness for long enough to explain what the problem really was.
“Well, um… you see, Miss…. I, uh…”
And then, once again, he simply stopped talking. She waited for several minutes.
“Rudy, just take a deep breath and let it all come out. You were sent here for sleeping in class. Tell me why that happened.”
“Okay, Miss. I been having bad dreams.”
“Oh? They’ve been keeping you from sleeping at night? What are the bad dreams about?”
“Um, well… In my dreams, I keep forgetting to put my clothes on before coming to school. I end up having to give a speech in Miss Burkett’s class standing naked in front of everybody. And the girls were laughing.”
“Oh, I see. Hmm. And what do you suppose is causing these dreams?”
He didn’t hesitate even for a moment. “P.E. Class!”
“Why P.E. Class?”
“Well, because… when it’s over, sixth graders have to take a shower. You have to get naked and go into the shower room where everybody can see.”
“But there are only other boys in there.” She knew as soon as she said it why that didn’t matter to Rudy. Even as she said it, she could see this shrinking-violet child trying to disappear in his chair.
“What do you think we should do about this problem?” She was thinking swim-suit for showers or something.
“Can we cancel P.E. Class?”
“Honey, that’s State-mandated curriculum. You can’t pass to the seventh grade without taking that class.”
“Can we cancel showers?”
“Young men in the sixth grade begin to have body odor. You know how that smell would affect learning?”
Rudy was dissolving in front of her.
“You are a vary brave young man. The best way to overcome this problem is to simply make up your mind not to let it affect you. The next time you have to take a shower, just face your fears head on. Take your clothes off and act like you want everybody to see you naked. Once you have endured the worst that can happen, you won’t have that bad dream anymore. You will know that you can do anything by being brave enough to try.”
Miraculously, Rudy seemed to brighten up, as if he had finally come to terms with the problem.
“Thanks, Miss. That helps a lot.”
As she dismissed him back to class, she couldn’t help but congratulate herself on saying the right thing at the right time.
The next morning, as students who walked to school from the neighborhood gathered in front of the school, Rudy showed up striding purposefully towards the front door wearing only a hat.
Most of the girls squealed in response, and then broke out into laughing conversations.
One of the most popular seventh-grade cheerleaders said loudly enough for everyone to hear, “I think he looks really cute like that! I wish all the boys were brave enough to come to school like that.”
“We would if all the girls did too!” hollored some invisible boy from somewhere in the back of the crowd.
Principal Eirohnee quickly brought both naked Rudy and Counselor Nacterine into her office.
Rudy was very comfortably nude as he stood in front of the principal’s desk and explained.
“It really cured my problem,” Rudy said. “From the time I made up my mind to do this I have felt nothing but confidence. If I can come to school naked, I can do anything!”
“Intend to go to all your classes today naked, do you?” asked the Principal.
“Yes, if you let me. If you don’t, it was still worth it.”
Full of pride for her part in Rudy’s transformation, the Counselor said, “I think we should allow it.”
“Well, isn’t that precious. Why don’t we just change the dress code for the day and have everybody go to school today naked?”
“I’d be willing to try that,” Miss Nacterine said.
**Author’s note** You could argue that the Counselor was fired for not understanding what sarcasm was, but, more likely, it was because of how the majority of the students showed up the following day.
Okay, this is the essay part. That first part is a terrible poem written by me to illustrate how to make your own found poem. Of course, you should know that I was not a natural-born poet. I am among the lower percentages of America’s worst-possible poets. Right there somewhere between the poetry books of Farley Bumbletongue and the Collected Musings of Hans Poopferbrains of Snarkytown, Wisconsin.
But I take great pride in my abilities as a terrible poet. You see, what I mainly was, truly was, was an English teacher of middle school and high school kids. And found poems were an activity in the classroom intended to teach writing skills, creativity, and an appreciation of what a poem actually is.
I needed a large usable picture file cut out of Christmas catalogs, Walmart advertisements, newspapers, magazines (“What are those?” is the most common comment you would get out of today’s classrooms,) grocery-store bargain flyers, outdated calendars, and any other non-pornographic picture sources available.
I would hand out three random images pulled out of the picture file without looking at them to each student (or small groups of students) and then require them to create a poem of at least twelve lines with an optional rhyme scheme and rhythm.
I would have to remind them not to eat the pictures, even if they were pictures of food. And with middle school students I would have to have extra pictures for the next class to replace the ones they ate anyway.
I would tell them there was a time-limit, specified to be much shorter than the actual time I planned to give them, and then let them create horrible poetry. Near Vogon quality in its horribleness.
When all of this was done, we would have a good long laugh by sharing the pictures and poems, and find out who the truly wacky and perverted poets were.
Now, don’t go telling parents that we teachers are wasting their children’s precious learning time this way, but it is not I lesson I created. Simply a lesson I used at least once every year.
But the real question on my mind is, “Given three random pictures, what kind of poem would you write?” Feel free to share.
