Popping in with an update.
The highlight of my week occurred this morning as we read aloud from our crappy novel. We were trading the responsibility of reading around the room, the students sitting in their desks or sprawled out on the floor as we made our way through the chapter.
Because this class is so poor on attendance, I often find myself floating about the room handing out assignments that need to be caught up and rediscussing the day’s assignment with the ESL students. After interrupting the round robin reading for the umpteenth time to impart some VERY IMPORTANT POINT about the goddamned Nicholas Sparks novel, I got up to grab my gradebook from the back on the classroom. I noticed two students snickering about something, and a third with his sweatshirt pulled over his nose. I headed past these three to my desk when I suddenly hit a Wall of Odor.
What the hell was that? Had someone crapped on my desk? Upon realizing I had just walked through a rank cloud of stinking, rotten gut fart, I did my best to maintain composure.
If there is one thing you should know about Lauren, it is that Lauren believes the fart is the highest form of humor. Juvenile? Totally.
I made it back to the front of the room without cracking a smile, marking participation points for the students that volunteered to read aloud, and gazing out at them trying to stifle my laughter. You could measure the travel of this fart across the room as it spread. The awful faces and cries of disgust moved like a wave across the gaggle of students until it eventually hit me, again, in the front of the classroom, and lingered like fog.
We all lost it. I couldn’t contain myself. The students were simultaneously amused at my loss of composure and horrified at the fart that violently offended us. Someone demanded I turn on the fan. I offered bonus points to the person who would claim it. No one did.
Any modicum of control I had over the class dissolved for the rest of the hour, but hell, I my first belly laugh in that school all semester.
Even if it did pain me to breathe.