O Brother, Where Fart Thou?

I feel like my blog has been all doom and gloom lately because the kids and I have been sick and I’m tired pretty much all of the time. My throat feels a little bit like it’s on fire so that’s fun, but whatever. This too shall pass and all that.

I have a story that I’ve been wanting to share with you, but I had to wait a little bit so it wasn’t super obvious which school it happened at. I’m usually pretty good at keeping my teacher face on when hilarious moments with students ensue, but there have moments when I’ve just about lost it or almost done damage to my internal organs trying to hold my laughter in.

(One such moment where I failed miserably was where a student spun the globe on my desk, pointed his finger on a country, misread the name of said country and proudly announced to the class that he was going to move to *insert name for female body part*. He had no idea what he’d said, I was over tired and had to excuse myself and leave the room. I went into my colleagues classroom and nearly wet my pants.)

When I was a kid, I took part in the Girl Scouts program. I loved being in Brownies, and completely immersed myself in it. One of my all-time favourite memories was a special evening that our leaders put on for us called a “Monk Supper”. You eat the meal entirely in silence, and each time you speak or giggle, you lose a utensil. You purposely serve something messy like spaghetti, so people end up eating with their hands and making a mess of themselves. It’s great fun.

But, for a while at the beginning, everyone eats in this energized, anxious silence, waiting for the first person to lose their fork. At one of these monk suppers, we were all eating in a circle in the hall, so everyone could see one another. The room was electric and silent, except for the scraping of forks on plates as we twisted our pasta. Everything was quiet, and then one of my leaders accidentally let out this enormous fart. This was before the days of cell phone apps so we knew it was real, and she turned about 80 shades of red when it happened… and we all had to cup our hands over our mouths and try not to make a sound as we died laughing. (I failed miserably at this, just for the record.) It is still one of my FAVOURITE memories from my childhood and I giggle every time I think about it. I mean, this was one seriously loud toot. I’m sure she was mortified, but she played it off well and was no worse for the wear.

I’m going to let you in on a little secret: as a teacher, this is one of my biggest fears. Every time I’m supervising a test or quiet activity, I’m SO NERVOUS that I’ll suddenly toot and the whole room will hear me.

Thankfully it hasn’t happened yet.

However…

In one of my assignments since starting back to work I was supervising a class that was completing a quiet, independent activity. They were all hard at work, hunched over their desks, deep in concentration. I was slowly walking through the aisles making sure everyone was on task, pausing quickly by each student ensuring they were headed in the right direction with their work.

Then it happened.

As I approached one student, they let out this loud gunshot fart. It was so loud and there was no mistaking what it was–you couldn’t blame this one on a chair leg scraping the floor. I opened my mouth in horror for one second thinking that maybe it was me, but then I realized that this student must have deliberately waited for me to come by before letting it rip so it wouldn’t be as obvious who the culprit was. This made me start to giggle, which I had to try and cover with a horrific coughing attack and excusing myself from the area immediately. This kid didn’t even look up from their work, seriously intent on shifting the blame to me. I had to sit at my desk and think about sad puppies while I did some deep breathing to try and shove the laughter bubbling up in my throat back into my chest. (No small feat, I assure you.) The class sort of giggled for a minute and looked around at me before getting back to their work.

I decided to take one for the team and not say anything. I know being a student in high school is hard enough as it is, without being the kid that farted in class.

So I guess now I’m just the tooty teacher… lucky for the kid, it was not a tell-tale fart.

(I’m so punny!)