a movie review, of sorts

OK, so this morning I go teach my 7:30 in the freakin' a.m. class, which is usually a chore for me because frankly, I don't think about what I'm going to do until I get there. I mean, I have lesson plans, and such, but the spectrum of abilites in there is all over the place, so more often than not, I find myself punting.

Well, today, the last student giving oral presentations goes. At least I'm feeling confident that it's not going to bore me to death. Some were really painful, and the rest were merely adequate. But this chick does a presentation on how to make a lemon coconut cake.

After going through all the instructions, she reaches behind the desk and pulls out a finished cake. Sweet! She even brought milk and juice for an impromptu snack. Needless to say, I gave her an "A." (OK, she earned it, but the "visual aid" was a bonus).

We clean up, and proceed with the day's lesson--some torture on adjectives (comparative and superlative). Here is where I confess that I am a literature teacher, not a grammarian. If my participles were dangling I'd blush, because the only thing that comes to mind is a naughty comment.

Anyway, here we are struggling through the lesson, with me staying barely one step ahead of the class, when one of the guys in the back row starts making really weird sounds. I'm talking strange noises here. Strange enough to have people looking AT ME like I'm supposed to do something. The guy is having trouble clearing his throat, so I suggest that he go get a drink of water.

When he returns, he starts making even weirder sounds. I don't know how to describe it--it's like he's pushing air through his throat, only it sounds really painful. I look up at him again, and he has stuck his finger all the way into his ear and is wiggling it like crazy, like he's trying to scratch at it or something.

IT WAS A SCENE STRAIGHT OUT OF HITCH!!! He was living the gigantic allergic reaction that Hitch had to shellfish. Oh my goodness, I was about to die laughing when it occurs to me that maybe I should be doing something other than laughing. So, I ask the poor kid if he's allergic to coconut, and he doesn't know, but it is now painfully clear to everyone else in the room that he is.

I suggested that he go get some more water and work on flushing his system. In retrospect, maybe I should have just sent him home. Anyway, we all settle back down to continue the torture, when my department chair decides that today is a good day to observe me, so she wanders in and takes a seat NEXT TO THE KID!!!

He starts hissing like a Cobra again, and we're all used to it by now, so we ignore it. But of course, there's no way humanly possible that she's going to ignore it, so I tell the kid to go get some more water, and I explain to her briefly what happened.

So then I ask her if I'm supposed to write an incident report, and she gets this blank look like maybe she hadn't thought about it before, and so she says "No."

I don't know if I was expecting a yes, or what, because then I ask her what happens if he drops dead. I get the same pained look, only this time she says, "Well, maybe then you should do an incident report."

HA!

Well, I survive that exchange and go back to my office to post this entry. It occurs to me that it would be really funny if I find a picture of Will Smith from that scene in Hitch, so I do a lame Google search. The thing is, that I have to turn off my pop-up blocker in order to run a report that I need for one of my classes, and I had forgotten to put it back on. Bad mistake.

FYI: don't search for the combination celebrity + pictures if you don't have a pop-up blocker. I instantly got assailed by PORN. Nice. On the college server. The damn thing even reset my start page as some atrocious thing. I'm still panicked.

Do you know how quickly I can delete cookies, history, run a disk clean up and reset the start page? Yeah, turbo speed.

Tune in tomorrow to see if i still have a job.