Wednesday, November 25, 2009

Yesterday in Class: Rats Ate My Homework

Every year, the Life Skills teacher has her students carry around bags of flour with heads made of pantyhose. This is supposed to teach the kids the responsibility of having babies. They had to dress the bags of flour, name them, keep a blanket on them, and carry them from class to class. If they're caught not treating the bag of flour baby right, then us teachers are supposed to snitch on them.

I have two girls who are in the class. I noticed yesterday that they didn't have their babies with them, and they both looked sad.

Me: Where's your babies?

Kid 1: We don't have them any more.

Me: Oh, the project's over? Did you make a good grade?


Kid 1: No. The teacher had to cancel the project.


Kid 2: Yeah. Our babies got eaten.

Me: WHAT?!

Kid 1: We kept the babies in the pantry over the weekend. When we came in this morning to get them, rats had gotten in and eaten them.

Me: RATS ate your BABIES?!

Kid 2: Yeah, we're terrible parents.

10 comments:

Unknown said...

Later, one of the kids said: Yeah, but if they were real babies, we probably wouldn't have locked them in the pantry all weekend, and then the rats probably wouldn't have gotten them.


It's the "probably" in that sentence that worries me.

Robyn Campbell said...

Boy, I'm concerned. Probably? Yikes!

And hey! Pumpkin pie doesn't do anything for you? What about pecan pie and fried apple pies? Yeah, Robyn's cookin' and cleanin' and all that jazz. I'll be glad to see Thursday night arrive. :) See you Friday. Happy Thanksgiving.

Unknown said...

Oh. My. Gosh.

Years and years ago, we had to tote an egg around for Health class. I made a little bed for mine, a scrapbook of its adventures, added hair and a face. I turned it over to its "dad" for one afternoon and it got egg-napped by some surly seniors.

But at least it didn't get eaten by a rat.

Unknown said...

Robyn: Ooooooh. Pecan pie. *sigh*

Karen: The Health class does the egg sometimes, too. They are almost always broken by the end....or a little too "ripe."

Tabitha said...

We had to tote around eggs, too. Which I always thought was stupid. I mean, they're *eggs*. It just made us all feel ridiculous to be carting eggs to class. Plus, in the real world, those eggs would be in day care because we were supposed to be, you know, *working*. :)

When I went to a lamaze class before my first son was born, they had these pretty realistic newborn dolls that the instructor made us diaper and dress. Kids would probably get more out of something like that...though acquiring funds for dolls in school might be an issue. :)

Rhiannon Hart said...

I thought this carry an egg around-project was a myth about American schools that only happened on TV! We don't do this in Australia. Though we do put condoms on carrots in health class.

Vonna said...

At my high school, toting eggs or flour babies was unnecessary. We had such a high pregnancy rate that we had a daycare in the school. We got to see first hand what the parents (moms) had to do to take care of their infants while trying to finish high school.

Unknown said...

I ran into my old Health teacher a few years ago, and she told me that they use those robot babies now. She claims they've actually been pretty effective in deterring teen pregnancy. She could adjust the "difficulty" level of each baby, so she'd give tough ones to the girls she was worried about.

I keep trying to find my son's difficulty lever, but no such luck. He must have hidden it with the DVD remote.

Angela said...

OMG - so sad!!!

She probably didn't mean "probably"
(Let's hope!)

Heather Zundel said...

I think your first addendum to your post made me laugh even harder. "Probably..."