A Whale of a Prank

Today in my Grade 10 Honors English class, I distributed copies of Moby Dick-- which I found mouldering away on a high shelf in the book room-- and then counted the days of Spring Break on my fingers and did some long division on the board: eleven divided by 822 . . . the days of Spring Break divided by the number to pages in this great behemoth of a novel and I arrived at 74 pages a day . . . but I told them that would be the easy part of their Spring Break assignment-- the hard part would be the vocabulary in the enovel, which is erudite, recondite, and archaic-- and I told them I was halfway through and already the vocab list was over 150 words, and they would be quizzed on those words (and the entirety of the novel)on the day we returned from break . . . and then a couple kids started laughing and the rest of the class realized that I was April fooling them . . . but I did convince a couple of kids to actually take the novel and give it a shot-- I promised them the opening hundred pages would not disappoint, but then they might want to "skip a bit, brother" and make their way to the final sequence-- and perhaps this reverse psychology might work, the joke assignment might be more appealing than an authentic, graded task-- one kid said, "Better this book sits on my shelf than on a shelf in some closet."