Rascals

For privacy reasons, I don't talk very much about work here but it is one of the few things that makes me happy these days.  Today, I came in to my most energetic and noisy class to see the fourteen 12-year-old students sitting morosely in complete silence.

"What's up?" I asked, worriedly.

"We're upset," the most outspoken girl said.  "We can't think of any trick to play on you for April Fool's."

I laughed out loud, oddly touched that they'd thought of doing something and grateful that they wouldn't.  

"Doesn't anyone in class have anything fun, at least?" one of the boys at the back yelled.

"Actually," my littlest boy said to me, rather solemnly, "I brought you two fake cockroaches today.  I got them for fifty cents each."  My classes know about my cockroach aversion well and we have a little discussion about Blattodea every week. 

"Well, then, we must have them!  They can sit up front and be the class mascots."

He produced two awful-looking critters from his pencil case and poured them into my palm.  They even felt sort of real and bristly.  With a shudder, I brought them to the front of the class and we spent a very cheerful five minutes arranging them realistically over the projector and poking at them squeamishly.

"What are they called?" I asked their owner.

Without missing a beat, he said, "Charles and Carrie."

And for the rest of the period, the kids silently passed Charles and Carrie around, making them sit on shoulders, pencil cases and worksheets in a ghoulish-yet-friendly sort of sharing that gave the class a decidedly festive air.

At one point, something occurred to me and I turned to the boy who had produced the bugs saying, "You know what a really horrible prank would have been?  If you had told me you brought me two fake roaches and then..."

His eyes gleamed with sudden understanding as he caught on, "... and then when I put them on your hand one of them started crawling?"

Oh, dear god.  I love my students very much.