Dave Silences the Angry Mob!

At the start of Monday's department meeting, I had a moment of conversational triumph that made me quite happy-- it doesn't rival this anecdote, but it's still one of the rare times when I said the right thing at the right time-- all the English teachers were assembling in Stacey's room for the meeting and it was HOT in there and she didn't have any windows open nor did she have her AC on (which I understand, the thing sounds like a jet engine) so I climbed up on the radiator and started opening windows-- which is awkward and dangerous but it's the only way to get the upper windows open-- and while I was clambering around up there, I was also complaining loudly-- and everyone else was complaining about me, complaining that I was complaining too much, that I was causing a ruckus, that I was going to kill myself or knock over a bunch of Stacey's school stuff that was stacked on the radiator . . . and then Krystina walked into the room, waving her hands around her flushed face, complaining about how hot it was and nobody yelled at her-- they empathized with her and treated her kindly (this is typical behavior in my department, the other day when I played some King Gizzard and the Wizard Lizard for Stacey and Cunningham while we were driving to Wawa, they yelled at me the whole ride for "inflicting" this awful music on their ears but when I told them that Matt liked King Gizzard-- Matt is a very nice and intelligent middle-aged lawyer/finance guy who went to Princeton and is now taking up teaching-- they were like: "oh, it's probably music for smart people and we didn't get it") and then, after seeing how hot and bothered Kyrstina was, I had an epiphany, which I loudly delivered from my lofty perch to the room full of teachers and my boss, "Let's remember what our new principal said on the first day of school: Maslow before Bloom!" and everyone was shamed into silence because they remembered this moment from the opening meeting and it's true: you can't focus and learn anything when you're sweating, sticky and uncomfortable, Maslow's hierarchy of needs comes before Bloom's taxonomy of intellectual thought.