April 1st @ my Jr. High.

Started out as a normal day.  It’s the start of the election season for us – Student Body Officers for next year.  The kids were hanging their posters up, and one student found a perfect spot, a little too high up.  But he did figure out how to reach it:

I hadn’t planned on playing any jokes on anyone, until one of my students in 3^rd period suggested letting him go to another teacher’s class where he would just walk in, sit down in and not say a word.  We picked an appropriate teacher and I let him go.  Five minutes later he came back and told us that he had walked in and just sat down.  She asked him “Can I help you?”  He said nothing.  She asked again and he again said nothing.  This went on for a couple minutes, until he just got up and walked out.  After hearing the story, I went to go let her know it was an April Fool’s day joke, she was just standing in the hall shaking her head.

This got my creative juices flowing.  It took me the rest of 3^rd period to come up with something. 

BACKGROUND: When a student gets their schedule changed they show up to their new classes with a printout of their schedule with the new class highlighted. 

I figured out a way to download a schedule with the right teacher in the right period slot.  I downloaded it into an Excel spreadsheet so it was easy to change the name, print them out and highlight the right period. 

I printed up five of them and sent the students down to the Social Studies teacher’s room, one at a time about a minute apart.  They walked in, handed her the paper and told her that they had just been transferred in.

I really didn’t expect it to work so well, but one of the students came back and told me that she was in the counseling center asking why she was getting 5 new students this late in the semester.  I went down there to see what was going on, and they were laughing – they had looked up the kids real schedule, saw they were all in my class that period and figured out I was the culprit.

I went back up to my room, faked new ones for the Art teacher, and sent the rest of my kids down there.  The Art teacher also went to the Counseling Center with a handful of new schedules to find out what was going on.  When none of my students came back after about 10 minutes, I headed down there to see what was going on.  As I passed the Counseling Center, I saw the Art teacher in there and when she saw me she gave me a “you jerk” look.  I went into the office, we laughed about it and she said that since they were watching a movie on proportions, she’d just keep my class down there.  She left to go back to class, I was going to follow her (after apologizing to the counseling secretaries) when the principal came in and asked what was so funny.  We told her and she immediately asked if I’d “got” this teacher or that teacher, and I ended up leaving with a list of teachers to get during 6^th and 7^th periods, officially sanctioned by the principal.

I went to help with my class for the rest of 7^th period, and after that was my prep period and lunch.  I got up to my classroom for 6^th period and found this:

My classroom was cleaned out of all the student desks.  30 some-odd students about to show up and not a place for them to sit.  (Found out later that this was pay-back from the Social Studies teacher).  No problem, I just told them to have a seat on the floor where their desk should be, so I could still take roll from the seating chart.  To their credit, they were pretty much right on the mark, I had no problem telling who was there and who was absent.

Not wanting to be deterred from my own agenda, I sent my class off with their “new” schedules to three of the teachers on my list.  Word had gotten out by this point, and most of the teachers just went with the flow and kept my students (I’m going to have to do this more often ), the health teacher sent 5 of his students back to me with a big poster that said “Sorry, I didn’t fall for it”.  I took advantage of this and paid each of them a soda to help me move my desks back into the room – they were in the large group instruction room right across the hall from mine. 

Sixth period ended and 7^th period started.  The secretary from the front office came over the P.A. to tell me that I was needed in the office.  Something about two of my students being in trouble and the police being involved.  It’s highly unusual for a teacher to be pulled out of their class so I immediately suspected it was a joke.  I told her that, she said it wasn’t, I said ‘yeah, right’, she said something about putting the cop on the P.A. to talk to me.  Still feeling that it was bogus, I figured I’d just go down there and get it over with.

When I got to the office and saw no police officers anywhere, I was even more convinced that it wasn’t real and went into the Vice Principal’s office to find my two missing students sitting with the V.P. talking to them.  Still suspicious, I listened to the story about something they had done, that was really bad, that involved me.  As I listened I noticed the demeanor of the two students and started to believe it was real.  One student wouldn’t even look at me, he was sitting there shaking and looked like he had been crying.  The other one also wouldn’t look right at me and kept answering questions in the typical 8^th grade, vague and deflective way.  The V.P. tried to get them to tell me what they had done, but they just couldn’t spit it out.  The principal came in and said something about calling their parents and that I should come back after school, after the kids had had a chance to talk to their parents.

I got back up to my room and my desks were all turned around facing the back, and occupied by students that were not mine.  I found out that my own 7^th period students had turned the desks around as soon as I left the room, but the change in students was the Art teacher’s pay back.

As the Art teacher was getting her students out of the room and mine were coming back in, the principal, VP and the two students got off the elevator with big grins on their faces.  Yup, they had got me.  I had to congratulate them because despite being suspicious, despite expecting it to be a con, I still fell for it – all because of how well the students acted.  The one kid had made himself cry and was purposely twitching his leg so he would look nervous.  The other kid had started to laugh but covered it up so well that it came across as if he was trying to keep from crying.  I was impressed, and we had a good laugh over it.

It was a great day, one that was truly, truly needed.