Thank You, Google
Here’s another entry from my personal journal of the 2008-2009 school year. Look for other tales from the classroom under the tag “Rotten Apples.” Please note that all student and school names and have been changed in the interest of privacy. Enjoy!
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Tuesday, January 7th
Thank You, Google
I was hoping over Christmas Break that my room would be forgotten as the choice hangout spot of students who would rather browse the internet than go to lunch. My hopes were dashed as the 3rd period lunch bell rang and the usual handful of kids trickled into the computer lab to get their daily fix of Facebook (MySpace is sooooo 2005) and YouTube.
The biggest problem with having kids around during lunch is that our lunch period falls during my planning period – and it’s very hard to get anything prepared when I have kids in my room.
Take today for instance. Cara Bentham spent her entire lunch period in my room looking up local sex offenders. Why? I have no idea. But, after each one she found, she provided me with a full breakdown of what the offender did and how close they lived to local points of interest. So, for half of my planning – a time where I should be busy making lessons or grading papers – I was having the following conversation over and over:
“Mr. Martin…hey, look at this guy!”
“He looks like a freak, what’d he do?”
“It says rape,’”
“Yikes, where does he live?”
“Oh God! It says he lives right next to the gas station! I’m not going there anymore!”
“Yeah, that might be a good idea.”
“Mr. Martin, Mr. Martin, check out this one!”
The only variation in this seemingly endless dialogue about local degenerates came at the very end, or somewhere around the 11th sex offender.
“Mr. Martin, hey, here’s another one. This one lives out by the firehouse.”
“Oh, yeah?” At this point, I was not even looking up from what I was trying to work on.
“Yeah!”
Thirty, maybe forty seconds passed. I assumed the game of find the pervert was over. I looked out of the corner of my eye and noticed Cara squinting at the monitor.
“Mr. Martin, what’s sodomy?” Cara asked.
I responded with what I always do when a student asks me a question for which I do not have an immediate answer: “Huh?”
“What’s sodomy mean? It says he got in trouble for sodomy.”
I turned and faced Cara. Having just had a daughter, I really didn’t want the memory of my first “birds and bees” conversation to be a discussion of the particulars of butt-love with a 20 year old, second-time high school senior. So, instead of launching into the whole “when a man and woman, or two men, or two women and a plastic object, love each other very much” speech, I decided to go a different route.
“I’m not sure, Cara, why don’t you just Google it.”
She nodded and began pecking the letters out one at a time on the keyboard. She was on the second “o” in “sodomy” before I interrupted her.
“Oh, Cara.”
“Yeah,” she said, looking up from her keyboard.
“Make sure you do a web search instead of an image one, okay.”
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Wow, I laughed at this one too, and like I told you in class, the look on your face must have been priceless. I’m pretty sure you change their names in this, but who actually asked you this?
I’ll never tell!