One Resolution Down, Too Many to Go . . .

Two days into the New Year, and I've already accomplished one of my resolutions-- I laid this out in the new episode of We Defy Augury: Traveling Through the Dark, but in short, I was determined to inject some "reality" back into my classroom and bring back some of my weird social experiment trickery that fell by the wayside-- so today I executed the "bee in the cup" social experiment-- where, after reading a rite-of-passage narrative about a troubled kid who learns to be a beekeeper and has to endure an increasing number of self-inflicted trail stings-- I ask a volunteer from the class to undergo a rite-of-passage and get stung by a bee in front of the class . . . and I always get a volunteer-- this year the girl who came up, after asking if this was "principal approved?" and I said, "Not at all!" rolled her sleeve up and closed her eyes-- she was really nervous-- so she didn't even see that it was a fake bee in a paper cup, attached to the lid by human hair . . . and in the same class I also set up the poem "Traveling Through The Dark" with a specious tale at the start of class-- I told them that I was running late for work because my son left me the car with very little gas in it-- which was true-- but then I found a dead cat at the end of our driveway and when I went to pick it up and put it in the trash, I noticed that it was pregnant and full of kittens, one of them struggling to be born-- but I didn't have time to call the vet or do a C-section, so I threw the cat in my neighbor's trash-- a great touch that always gets them-- and while the debate about what I did wasn't as uproarious as in the past, it still generated some discussion . . . anyway, I kind of stopped doing these weird social experiments a few years ago-- around COVID? or when kids got addicted to cell phones and it was hard enough to pull them into reality-- but I'm determined to bring "reality" back into my classroom-- or some fictitious version of it and I'm also determined to have kids put their cell phones in the holder in the front of the room-- I usually get lazy and stop doing this a few weeks into the year and then get pissed off at the kids for taking out their phones, but I'm going to remain consistent for the rest of my teaching career and get those damned things as far away from the students as possible so that I can lie to them and trick them more . . . and they seemed appreciative of my efforts at trickery today, so I will carry on with my resolution as planned and try to execute a few more of these experiments (and again, if you're truly interested in this, listen to the new episode of We Defy Augury . . . I reflect on a full career of these weird moments).