Homeroom Humor

Punchline

It was a rainy day and the children were inside for recess. They were seated around the room, engaged in various activities of their own choosing. I was helping one group get started when I heard a loud “OW!” I decided it had come from the corner where Jimmy and Steve were playing a game. They were best friends even though they were opposites. Both were bright. But Jimmy was quiet and Steve was known to have a temper and an advanced vocabulary of inappropriate words that would “make a sailor blush.” I walked over and asked if there was a problem. Jimmy said Steve had punched him in the arm. I looked at Steve and said, “We have talked about this before. When you have a problem you need to use your words.” He looked at me and said, “If I used my words, I’d be in more trouble than I am now.” Susan Rodda, NE Zeta

Go Fish!

My high school library club decided we needed a library pet, and a fish was suggested. One showed up on the checkout counter the next day. The students named the fish Dewey Decimal. I went to the biology teacher for feeding advice and was given a small box of food and shown how much to feed this one tiny fish each day. Dewey grew and thrived, we thought, except he didn’t quit growing. He got bigger and bigger.

One morning, I found Dewey had sort of exploded in his fishbowl. Eulogies were written and read as the club sent me to flush him to a better place. Another fish came to live in the library and the biology teacher said, “You fed that fish too much, and he blew up, so make sure this one only gets a pinch of food per day!”

The new fish was named Maggie Zine. She was tiny and didn’t grow at all. About two months later a student found Maggie floating on top of the water in her glass bowl. Many poems eulogized tiny Miss Maggie Zine as she was flushed to the other side. The biology teacher said it looked like we starved her to death. A new fish came to us, and we were determined it would live a long happy life in the library.

Micro Fiche was an active fish. A chart was created to monitor his feeding. He became a great pet as the months ticked away that year. We were happy thinking we were doing a great job raising Micro and happily left for Christmas break. We didn’t know the school turned the heat off during break or that a giant ice storm would hit the area and extend our break. Micro slipped our minds during the holidays, ice skating and snow storm fun. But as I entered the library that first day back, I found in the fish bowl a block of ice with our Micro in the middle frozen in time. The biology teacher said it might be possible that when the ice thawed out the fish might come back to normal if it had hibernated in the ice. What? Well, we watched and waited but Micro just floated and soon was pronounced dead and flushed away. After this experience, the library club decided it did not need a pet at all. Rachel Shankles, IVP SCR, AR Alpha Epsilon