Laugh-laugh-laugh

Chapter 5.  Laugh-laugh-laugh
            (Excerpt from Angels in the Classroom)

           

            Jude came in from the bathroom.  “Hey Lucy! I’m hooooome!”

I took a deep breath. “Please leave the room and come back the right way.”  He does.  It gave me a chance not to start laughing with the rest of the people in the room.

            Jude also once wrote a story.  The story starter (the only one I ever choose to use) was:  You are walking through the leaves on a beautiful fall day.  Suddenly you hear a voice in the leaves shout, “Help!”

Jude wrote:     There was my lost cheeseburger.  It had gone away and I couldn’t find it.  It wanted me to eat it.  I love my cheeseburger.

You try not to laugh at that.  Not enough content to get an A but funny nonetheless.

Laughter is something on which we teachers have to have a tight handle. Not stopping the classroom from laughter. That would be sad.  I mean, stopping yourself from laughing at the stunts and absurdities.  I frequently reminded them, “Second grade isn’t a comedy club.”

Eleanor would often cause me to lose my handle on restraint.  When I said to my always noisy group, “Quiet down, let’s get started with math.” Ellie shouted, “Yeah! We might as well get it over with.”  Another day, when I gave the sign for the class to stop and listen, she shouted, “Hey! Let the lady talk!”

When you have a class of people who all want your attention, your love, laughter helps them and kept all of us moving forward.  I’d say to the whiner “What? Your leg hurts? Let me get my scissors.”  Or after another day of three children coming back from recess holding baggies of ice: “We are depleting the Earth of fresh water and baggies, people!”

Our school had lovely banisters.  The rails were hip level for most seven year olds.  Just raising the haunch an inch or two and the ride was free.  The urge to slide was felt by everyone, even me.  (I resisted the urge.)  Sliding down the rails was not seen as “responsible” behavior.  It was especially irresponsible to do it when the whole class was lined up in front of you like bowling pins.  My question to anyone I saw doing it was “Who will want to put their hand on that railing after your bottom* slid on it?  Yuck!”

* insert any of the following:

            Keyster

            Boomba

            Rear

            Padut

            Dupa

            Tuchas

            Tuchy

            Buttocks (this always brought roars of laughter)

            The floors were marble, so landings needed to be perfect or someone would be required to clean up the blood.  “Who is going to clean up the mess after you break your head open?”

            I sang spelling words.  Let me rephrase that.  I looked for songs that contained our spelling words and sang them instead of saying a sentence during the test.  They loved to hate this.  I also found songs that reminded me of them and serenaded each student with his or her song.  One boy always had a cheese sandwich on a bagel for lunch.  His song was “The Boogey Woogey Bagel Boy of Room 203.”

Laughter is a great disciplinarian.  My absolute best threat was a lipstick kiss on the cheek a la grandma.  I would take out a tube of lipstick from my desk drawer, pocket or purse.  This usually brought a gasp from the class.  They knew what was coming.  Taking the lid off and slowly twisting the tube, I’d say “I noticed, Calvin (or whomever), you’re not doing your work.”  I’d apply lipstick to my bottom lip.  “I sure hope …” I then put lipstick on the right side of my top lip.  “you have started…”  Next the left side.  “your math.  I’d hate…”  I rubbed my lips together.  At this point everyone in the room had scrambled to do whatever they needed to be doing.  “To have to give you a big ol’ kiss on the cheek.”  I look up and around.  Everyone was on task. 

No student regardless of age or coolness was exempt.  I could silence a bus of rowdy kids simply by showing them how many tubes of lipstick I had in my purse.  The funny thing is they loved to hate it.  Sometimes secretly, they came to me with a cheek tilted upward and asked me to give them a kiss. 

Sometimes you’d get someone who laughs at everything.  If someone looked at him, he laughed. This is a tough problem.  Is that joy bubbling up? Is it a lack of self control? Is he a fairy changeling? 

I called Elmer over to talk quietly to him.  He didn’t exactly laugh at everything – he bellowed.  I asked “Can you please try some self control?  I feel like I’m calling your name all the time and having to stop the class while you calm down.  That can’t be fun for you.”

            “It was fun until you made me stop.”  

Laughter wells up in both grandiose and tiny ideas.  It is the ability to recognize the absurd in everyday moments.  It can be a slap stick moment or a bad joke.  It can be one of those hilarious misunderstandings which are as convoluted as “Who’s on First?”  We laughed many times each day, keeping the mundane at bay.

My mother always claims it is better to laugh than cry.  When we find ourselves doing both it becomes a truly soul cleansing moment.

One year a first grade teacher came to me and informed me a family of one of her students requested me as their son’s teacher for second grade.  She is a good friend of mine but she was concerned this little boy, who had a diagnosis of Aspergers, wouldn’t get my sense of humor or my sarcasm.

In fact, we got along famously.  I discovered he loved absurd vocabulary.  He was thrilled with words like fewmits or chimera.  I knew we had made it when he walked up to me one day with one eye shut.  “Guess what I am?”

“A one eyed pirate?” 

“No!” he harrumphed. “A Cyclops!”  He then proceeded to laugh so hard he could hardly breathe. 

I laughed too.  His joke wasn’t ready for Comedy Central. His joy at being able to tell a joke filled me with wondrous delight.

I am sure there were a few days without laughter in my room.  I don’t really recollect them.  There is a teacher saying that goes, “Never let them see you smile until November.” I would go bonkers. 

Instead, I remind them if we work hard we have plenty of time for fun.  I laugh at my own mistakes.  I read funny poems before lunch or even better, scary poems that make us laugh at how we jump.  I talk with crazy accents or voices.  Favorites were my terrible French accent or my fake brogue.  The kids loved to hate the muted pre-school teacher well modulated voice, “Now boys and girls, come sit with your friends.”  That was baby talk in their minds.  They loved my “whiney voice” but it gives me a headache to either talk like that or listen to it.

Sometimes they cannot realize what they said was funny.  I had an exceptionally bright group of boys one year who could spell any word I could think to give them.  I got them a set of unabridged dictionaries to peruse.  They were not only smart but fairly ornery.  A tattler told me they were looking up “bad words.”  I called Joel, the smarty pants who had the misfortune of being the one caught, over.  “I know you are smart but I didn’t get you those dictionaries to get you in trouble.  If you know it’s a bad idea, why did you do it?”

“I just don’t understand it.  It’s like a whole different side of my personality comes out when I see those bad words.” He looked like he was going to cry.

I had to swallow my mirth.  I still shake my head and think what side of Joel’s personality is going to come out when he’s a teenager. 

            I had been married to a man who had made me laugh every day.  He saw the absurd in most things and just making eye contact with him sometimes would crack me up.  I remember the first night we met.  It was a snowy winter night and we were riding the el home together after a Money and Banking class at The American Institute of Banking.  He was wearing these big leather, thick soled, hiking boots.  He had asked me a question which made me pause before I answered.  He pointed at the boots.  “I’m sorry,” he said, “I wear these big old waffle stompers to put in my mouth.  Open mouth. Insert foot.”  And I laughed.  I never stopped either. 

            He made jokes as he lay dying in the hospital and then in our living room.  We both had learned from a friend who had died years earlier that you live until you die.  He kept living.  The last few days were horrible as his eyes rolled in a morphine-induced stupor.  No jokes then.  We just muddled through those days.  The final joke came, though.

            We stood counting by 5s to 100.  Then we would start over.  Elena kept making mistakes through her tears.  Mark looked at me, a little frustrated by it.  I winked at him with a half smile. He nodded at me.  I held one hand, Elena the other.  Alec stood next to his sister.  Pie, our huge orange cat, lay between his legs to help Mark with this part of his journey. 

            Mark’s morphine had been out for a few hours at this point and we were doing what I called Mommy Lamaze.  It was keeping a mind focused on something else to distract you from the pain.  Skip counting or saying your ABCs was a wonderful trick for skinned knees.  This, however, was life-ending mortal pain.

            The crazy, red head, useless, substitute hospice nurse had shown up at 7:45 after she had called me at six to ask directions to our house from the suburbs.  I told her to ask someone else. 

            Her hand shook as she refilled the morphine pump.  Too little, too late, I thought.

            I told the kids no school today.  This is it. 

            As Mark took his last breaths, we all were saying, “I love you Daddy.” “I love you Dad.”  “Go to your beautiful place, Mark.  I will love you forever.”

            As Mark took his last breath, my children and I stood holding his hands.  Chopin played on the stereo.  Suddenly, the overpowering sound of a waterfall filled the room.  The music had switched to a waterfall c.d.  It was incredibly loud.  We all laughed.  I rushed to turn it off.  Who knew I was turning off the laughter that had filled my home for so long?

            Thank heavens for seven year old laughter that saved my life.