Prior installments:
One morning there was a single orange Crocs shoe sitting on the front office desk. I asked what happened and it was explained that the shoe ended up on top of the school yesterday afternoon (the freshman owner of the shoe threw it while waiting for the bus), and it had only just been retrieved from the roof.
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Student: “Can I go to the washroom?”
Me: “Washroom?”
Student: “Yeah, I figured I’d try out that word this week.”
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Arguing with the class over which is a better superpower: invisibility or the ability to fly. The class is heavily in favor of invisibility.
Me: “Flying is by far the better option. I would love to fly.”
Student: “If I saw you flying I’d shoot you.”
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Student slowly getting more and more frustrated while trying to type an essay – turns out his friends made a lot of covert alterations to the auto-correct settings on his Chromebook, making it so that every time he types “the” it changed it to “at” and every time he typed “a” it changed to “aaaa,” and so on and so forth. It takes us way too long to realize what happened. Student is enraged. A classic prank.
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Student: “Do you like watching golf, Mr. Scott?”
Me: “No.”
Student in the back of the class: “Could’ve fooled me!”
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For a month there was a girl clomping around the hallways with one crutch, which she had elevated a good six inches too high, so that it was serving no purpose other than to make her a bizarre spectacle through the empty hallways a few minutes before the bell rang.
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Student eating a sandwich at the beginning of first block.
Me, trying to make conversation: “What’s in that sandwich?”
Student (shrugging): “Couldn’t tell you.”
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One morning I overhear a mean girl greet her friend in the hallway with this: “Oh wow I see you’re going with the whole no-makeup thing.”
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“I burned my thumb. This is my favorite thumb!”
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This is not a new discovery by me, but it’s always worth savoring how teenagers have the most creative and precise insults. For example, my wife gives me a haircut that’s pretty close. This next day, students immediately analogize me to Woody from Toy Story.
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It’s common for laptop chargers and AirPod cases to get left in the classroom. Normally students return within a block or two asking if they left it there. One day after class I find a single Airpods on the floor. I put it on my desk, expecting the owner to return within a block. After a week, I just put it in an envelope and shove it in my desk.
Literally a month later, student walks into my class if I had seen her lost earbud. I offer her the envelope – she is delighted. Makes no sense at all to me.
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Student is moving to a high school in North Carolina next year. She expresses dismay/frustration that the mascot of her future school is also the Wolverine, and its initials are also WHS.
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At VHSL Forensics State Competition, sitting in a room where I am judging a crew of poetry orators. The next room also has poetry. It’s common to hear shouts and even screams as the students really try to milk their poems for emotional impact. During a brief pause in my room, though, we can all hear an insane cackle through the walls. High-pitched, sustained, unnerving. It’s to the point where it distracts the students in my room. I smile in appreciation. The cackler is my student, Rett Dean, doing a devilishly inspired performance of an old Robert Service poem. For his efforts he would stand on stage and be presented with a medal a few hours later.
There are birds in the courtyard. They’re loud and echo-ing. The kids claim, not unfairly, that they sound fake.
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Camilla: “How did you learn banjo?”
Me: “I watched some Youtube videos.”
Camilla: “That reminds me of guitar class during online school.”
Me: “Oh, you learned guitar by watching Youtube?”
Camilla: “No, but when the teacher asked me to play, I would have my camera off, and I would play a YouTube video of the song I was supposed to have learned–“
Me: “Ah.”
Camilla: “–and the teacher would always tell me how good I sounded!”
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Printer isn’t working in the 600 hallway. I spend five minutes fixing it. It proceeds to spit out forty pages of…sheet music…Minecraft sheet music.
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A sign of a good kid: you give them a Chromebook’s charger and they return it at the end of the class.
A great kid: they not only return it, but they return it carefully wrapped.
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Cole: “Mr. Scott, what would you give me if I get an advanced score on the Reading SOL?”
Me (after briefly meditating on Cole’s past performance and the general rigor required to do well on the Reading SOL and Cole’s tendency to watch lacrosse game film during crucial moments in class): “I would get you your favorite Jersey Mike sub.”
Two weeks later, SOL scores are released. Cole gets a 500, the lowest possible score that is still advanced. I spend my lunch break ordering a digital Jersey Mike gift card for Cole.
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A very fun nickname: All Rise. This was bestowed by the students to a substitute PE teacher they had in middle school. It was earned based on his tendency to bellow those words to the seated students at the beginning of gym.
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Student Aaron walking down the hallway sporting these big new silver headphones. He nods at me in greeting.
Me: “Nice headphones, Aaron!”
Aaron: “I’m good, how are you?”