Damn You Creativity! Damn You!

I love, love teaching middle school. What a perfect age...

Headache is a student of mine who is aptly describe as "unmotivated". He lies and lies about the work that he has done at home, in his locker, already passed in, etc, etc. Also, his nom d'blog comes from how he pretends to have migraines in order to get out of work- usually math class. (Funny how headaches and pre-algebra seem to occur at the same time...) But of course, he's motivated by what he's interested in. To wit, he has created a coded alphabet with each letter being represented by a symbol he created. He hand-copied and passed out code keys to all of his friends and they've been furiously sending notes to each other. This is a student who can't be bothered to write out the words "I don't know" instead abbreviating it as IDK when he's trying to fill in the lines of a worksheet he hasn't bothered to look at closely enough to figure out that he does actually know what to do.

Today, my trusty assistant, Wrestler, got his hands on a code key and made the fact known to Headache. Headache then announced to the class to stop using the current code because he was going to make a new one. How great is that?

Right before we left for the day, Wrestler was uncrumpling a piece of paper he picked up off the floor and noticed it was a coded message. He whipped out his trusty decoder and went to work. The message read: Asshole, you got me in trouble.

Did I mention I love middle school?