Confessions Of A Retired Teacher aka The Pencil Sharpener Story…

In the fall of 2005 I was teaching fifth grade Language Arts. For those of you who are non-teachers I will give you an idea of what that is like to teach 5th grade. Imagine hosting a birthday party for thirty 10 year olds for 8 hours, all while you are spinning plates, and doing your taxes. Now imagine the bathroom is across the street, 5 of the children have to pee, two want to puke, two want to go home, one is sleeping and 15 are quietly planning on kicking the sticks the plates are spinning on, if you are doing the math that only leaves about 5 who realize this is a birthday party.

This particular group of students were hyper vigilant about the sharpness of their pencils. So much so that by the end of the second week we had gone through two old school manual sharpness, and 50 hand held jobs. Honestly these children spent more time sharpening pencils each class than any students I had taught in my 20 years. My solution was to go to Office Max and buy a state of the art, heavy duty, industrial strength electric pencil sharpner. This thing had all the bells and whistles, and by that I mean blades sharp enough to hone steel rods and an engine that could drive a 747. As you might surmise those little bitches had that thing on its last leg by the third day.

One determined student, Tobias, was not particularly interested in my super important lesson for the day, how to write a 5 paragraph essay. (Honestly one of the most important things a kid can learn.) While I was blathering on about topic sentences and paragraphing this pip-squeak had the nerve to get up from his seat and TRY to sharpen his pencil. Have you ever heard a half-dead moose groan? That my friends is what the “high tech” sharper sounded like, it was sharpening it’s last pencil and bellowing loud guttural sounds all while I was TEACHING!!!

I did what any seasoned teacher does, I stopped, gave Tobias the “take your seat look.” He stopped, and I thought understood the unspoken message, and would be heading to his table at any second. So, I began again and that little shit put the pencil back into the sharpener! We repeated this dance of shorts about three times!!! Fifth graders are a fragile bunch so rather than scream at Toby, I calmly walked over to him and directed him to another slightly less broken, quiet sharpener. I then unplugged the sharpener wrapped the cord around it, opened the window and LOBBED it out! Down, down, down it fell, two floors gently crashing onto the bike racks below. The students were agog, stunned into a frightened silence. This crazy bitch they had only known for two weeks just opened a window and threw out school property, what would she do next? Well, I calmly walked back to the overhead projector and taught the rest of my lesson to the quietest group of students I had ever known.

When the bell rang some 10 minutes later those children were out of that room and off to the cafeteria like their pants were on fire. The next part I did not witness but word on the street was, that the lunchroom was a buzz with talk of Miss Halasz throwing a kid out of a second floor window. The Principal was doing lunch duty that day and was NOT happy.

As you might guess, the Principal and I had a heart to heart in her office and the main messages I took away were: 1. You could have killed someone. 2. You could have killed someone and that made lunchroom duty super hard today. 3. Are you stupid and you could have killed someone. 4. I’m going to get a shit load of calls from pissed-off parents saying, “She could have killed someone!” 5. You could have killed someone, but since I don’t know anyone else crazy enough to do this job and I sure the hell don’t want to take your place, you are not fired.

Well, luckily this class of children had super amazing parents, the kind of parents who actually have a sense of humor and know how wacky their kids are. The ring-leader of this group was a woman named Liz. Liz is a whirling dervish of helpfulness mixed with talent mixed with humor. A few days after the “event” I was slinking around the hall trying to keep out of trouble and I ran into Liz. She immediately grabbed me and said, word on the street is there is a “bad ass” teacher in fifth grade, and the parents think her recent antics with the pencil sharpener were the most amazingly funny thing they had ever heard. In hushed tones I told Liz to keep it on the down low. I had gotten into a bit of trouble because of my “antics.” I told her that it was clear if the principal had a dead guy who could sit in a chair and hold a pencil I would be replaced by said dead guy faster than your head could spin! Not one to put up with any folly, Liz marched into the principals office and gave her, what I can only imagine was a, “come to Jesus” talk. Score one for Liz and the parents, score negative 50,000,000,000 for the teacher.

Within 15 minutes I was called back to the Principals office for a second round of scoldings. And sent off to do my job while I still had one. Years passed and the principal never came around to see the humor in the story. As a matter of fact I ran afoul of her again, when I had the nerve to gather children and usher them to safety during a tornado. Evidently I scared them, not the 150 mile-an-hour winds or the houses flying through the air… but me… BTW I outlasted that principal and am proud to say no students where injured by flying objects* while under my care!

Now to tie this story into a nice neat circle, a few years after this incident I bought a house down the street from sweet Tobias so I had the joy of watching him grow up. I’m happy to say he can write a 5 paragraph essay, uses only pens, and Graduated from The University of St. Thomas. In college he played football, I like to think he was inspired by my ability to throw an object long distances!

Ah…. the joy of teaching. xo 🙂

*Objects that I threw, it is middle school after all!