I'm meeting with 4 of the 5 other teachers from University School tonight as a kind of farawell/ I-can't-believe-we-made-it-through-last-year kind of thing, so I thought it would be useful (to myself) to briefly recap some of the highlights of last year, so that we have stuff to talk about.

1.  Rats - always a crowdpleaser.  Yes, our school had a rat problem.  And I've always been under the impression that rats hide during the day and then come out at night when nobody's around.  No, these were bold rats, who didn't mind prancing about the ceiling in the middle of class.  When an exterminator finally showed up and set up traps, he hadn't even set his last trap before two rats had already met their demise in the ceiling with violent flouncing about and ultrasonic screaming to their mommies.  And this was in the middle of class!  And rats that were caught in other traps that night were never removed.  The exterminator never came back, so our students got a science lesson in how bad a rotting rat carcas can smell.  I honestly think that the only reason the rat smell went away a week later was because of a subsequent ant problem.

2.  Meeting parents who were genuinely afraid of their child. 

3.  Being threatenned by a wannabe gang-banger who is later shot in the stomach in a Wal-Mart parking lot.

4.  After reading Chaucer's "The Nun's Priest's Tale" 3 times in class, students finally understanding the descriptions of rooster Chanticleer's sexual prowess. 

5.  For some reason our school was overrun with roly polys this spring, so one day after some students had finished their work, I enlisted them to capture as many of the little devils as they could and then to put them on the science teacher's desk.  She was delighted.

6.  Through a strange series of events, our lunch lady emerging as the head administrator of our school.  That's right, for a period of about a month and half, our superior was a woman whose specialty was hotdogs and prepackaged bologna sandwiches and whose education ended in the blur between her junior and senior year of high school. 

Well, that's enough for now.