- after losing participation points for the whole class because he could not keep his mouth shut, I told a student he could earn those points back by doing something to entertain me. He offered to do the worm and I accepted. It was amazing.
- three boys in the back of the room could not keep their hands of the blinds. It was more annoying than anything else so I kept telling them to knock it off just because it bugged me. One of these boys started hitting the other two every time they tried to touch the blinds so I asked him what he was doing. He said he was offering "blind justice" and it was his duty to protect the blinds. A few days later he was back to touching the blinds and he informed me that "blind justice" had retired. On the last day of school, he drew a picture of himself as a sheriff with a "blind justice" badge on and stuck it to the window.
- one of my boys figured out that I really liked the tv show The Office. He decided from that moment on he was going to pretend to be Dwight and insisted that I call him by that name. I cannot tell you how many times I called on him to answer a homework question and he proceeded to tell me all he knew about "bears and beets" in his best Dwight voice.
- one of my favorite (yes, we all have favorites) boys decided about halfway through the year that he was a ninja. When he didn't know an answer on a test, he'd write "ninja". He was a hurdler in track and on the back of a quiz, he drew a ninja jumping over a hurdle. He asked if I would call him "grasshopper" instead of by his name and of course I said yes.
- my first semester of boys got to see my pregnant belly grow from hardly visible to being so big I was accidently erasing the white board. Upon my first visit back to school after having Micah, one of these boys told me "I'd really slimmed down."
Given that my husband would probably have done any or all of the above when he was in junior high, I like to think these boys are preparing me for stuff my son will try to pull in the future!
