My teacher has a tendency to get pumped up with everything. She happens also to be one of the best teachers I have ever had. Take her “educational experiments”, for example.

At the beginning of the year, we played dice. Then it was wall ball, which was hitting a ball to a bunch of numbers taped to the wall. Then it was golf, knocking a ball to a spot on a big paper.

Then the next half of the year began. We played Bop-It, Groove-It, Guitar Zoom, and much more. It certainly was a fun year.

Now the TAKS, the biggest test of the school year, was coming up. And she was talking with another fifth grade teacher at another school. And they decided to have a little competition to see which class was better.

The bet was that if you lost, you would have to wear the other school’s mascot.  “You’re on,” my teacher said. And so it began.

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“A new-fangled technology came out a few years ago,” my teacher told me, “and it’s called video chat, and we’re going to use it today, again.” My teacher loved humor, and she was pretending we didn’t know this information.

We had used it before, with the Tennessee Science Center. We ended up having technical difficulties, and had technical difficulties for half an hour, ending up having to call the district technology director down.

“This time, we are hoping that it will be a little more successful than last time, and because of that, we are having the technology person staying here until we’re done.”

We all cheered. An hour later, we made it down to the lab.

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I had one hundred and fifty dollars stored in a bank about a year ago. Within a month, I had probably forgotten about it. The statements that came never mentioned anything about my one hundred and fifty dollars, but my parents kept on insisting they were of separate statements, probably.

I thought that was queer, since the statement for the 150 dollars (if it was separate) never came. One day,  I was matching up the account numbers.

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Talk about having a bad day. My poor father had one indeed.

He had just come home, and my mom was still out taking me to swimming practice.

We had received a notice from the neighborhood office about the weeds growing out in the cracks on our driveway. Honestly, they didn’t seem too many… until we saw the homes of other people.

Theirs were spotless clean, and so that afternoon my dad decided to do something about it.

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continued…

On the lower coast of Texas, where South Padre Island was, there was a dolphin watcher. Her name was Marg (not really). She loved the dolphins in the Gulf of Mexico, and her husband ran a dolphin-watching business.

We went dolphin watching with her for an entire day during my Brownsville spring break vacation.

This is her story, along with mine.

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<< The Brownsville Story: I – The One Who Loves Dolphins

I looked shocked for a moment, before Marg broke into laughter. When she saw the terrified looks on our faces, she apologized. “I was just joking.” It seemed everyone down here was like Derik.

We moved along as Marg began telling yet another story.

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My teacher pulled the biggest prank on me on April Fools. We all knew the teachers were going to pull a prank; they did this every year.

My friends tried pulling a prank on the teacher as well, but it was nothing compared to the teacher’s.

“Can you come to my birthday party?” One friend asked me. “Its on April 39th.”

“The chalkboard fell off like… a second ago!” Another said.

I grinned. April 1st was always fun.

“TEACHER!“, grinned the first friend, “Can you come to my party?” He gave her an invitation.

“Oh, I think I’m busy on April 39th, if you catch my drift,” the teacher said. Everyone giggled.

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