A Fool’s Education

In the ninth grade at Malden High School I had a teacher who I haven’t spoken of in years.

My April Fools Day post is the perfect time to tell you about him.

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In my freshman year of high school I had a biology teacher named Mr. Finley.  He was a smart, friendly man who had a quick wit and good sense of humor, but still taking his job seriously. 

One day he handed out a test while voicing the usual directive to read and follow the instructions.

Probably 95% of the class flunked it.

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Most of my readers know I have a soft spot in my heart for good teachers.  As the son and son-in-law of teachers, the brother of two retired teachers, the father of two teachers, and the father-in-law of two teachers, I have the utmost respect for the dedication of good teachers as well as the patience they must have at all times.

I also know that sometimes the hardest part of teaching a room full of young skulls full of mush is capturing and holding their attention.

Mr. Finley found a very effective way to do that.

The first instruction on the test said to read through the entire quiz before starting.  Of course fourteen and fifteen year old young men and women are often in such a hurry to get a test over with that they don’t even read the instructions in the first place, and that was the case with that quiz.

The first “question” instructed the test-taker to raise his right hand and scratch his head.

The second directive was to hiccup loudly.

From there each order got progressively more silly and, ultimately, embarrassing.

The final instruction at the bottom of the test was to ignore all the previous directives, turn the test upside down on their desks, and sit quietly until the rest of the class finished making fools of themselves.

The other students eventually found out that they should have followed that first instruction, read through to the final statement, and saved themselves all the embarrassment.  

Mr. Finley’s test taught some of us that day to read the instructions before starting a test…some of us.

The reason I thought of Mr. Finley is that I recently ran across a couple articles about teachers who played April Fools Day pranks on their students.  Some of them were simple but effective.  Others were ingenious.  All were funny.

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I mentioned simple yet effective. 

One teacher handed out a word-search puzzle and announced that anyone who found all the words on the list would get extra credit.

Of course, none of the words was actually included in the puzzle.  “April Fool” was in there a few times.

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One instructor engaged another teacher to help her.  Teacher A invested a few dollars in a wireless mouse and keyboard, which Teacher B took into a nearby room.

Teacher A set up a laptop in the back of her room and hooked it up with Skype to Teacher B’s computer.  A then covered the screen, but left the camera lens uncovered so that B could see what was going on in A’s room but A’s students couldn’t tell that they were being watched.

After the students were seated and A started teaching while standing away from her computer her students were amazed when her smartboard came to life and started typing silly messages like, “Does it stink in here to you?” or “I’ve tried to figure out how I’m going to use Algebra when I graduate, but it just doesn’t add up.”

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Teacher C found one of his old non-working cell phones in a drawer at home and took it to school with him.  He let one of his students in on his idea so the girl was not overly surprised when C yelled at her, “I’m sick and tired of having to tell you kids to stay off your phones in class.  Give it here!” 

When the girl complied, C took the cell from her hand and threw it hard against the wall, shattering it into pieces and yelling, “You won’t do THAT again, will you!”

I think a lot of his students put their phones away, at least for the rest of that class period.

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Teacher D got Principal E, to help her.  D took out her cell phone and changed E’s contact info to read “Detective Johnson.” 

D left her phone out where nearby students could read the detective’s name when the phone rang.  D scooped up the phone and moved to the corner of the room, where she turned away from her class and said, in a tone that seemed like she was trying not to be heard, but which the kids could hear, “How do you know it was me?  You can’t prove anything.”

A few minutes later Principal E came to the classroom door and said, “Ms. D, you need to come with me to the office, right now.”

The teacher and principal left the room long enough for the kids to imagine all kinds of crimes their teacher must have committed, then stepped back in, announcing, “April Fool!”

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Teacher F got the help of a few of his better students.  On the day they had set up, he told the class that he hadn’t slept well the night before and warned them not to give him any trouble.

A few minutes later he yelled at one of his “pet” students, “You’re breathing too loud!  Just get out of here!  Go to the office!  I warned you not to mess with me today!”

Before the other students could begin to recover he yelled at another of his hand-picked accomplices, “Stop looking at me like that!  You can go to the principal’s office too!  Go!”  A minute later, he hollered at another kid, “Stop looking at the clock!  I’ll let you go when I’m ready for you to go!  Go to the principal’s office!

The three offenders were waiting outside the door and, a moment later, stepped back into the room laughing.

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Teacher G also had some students to help her.  She gave them some printed papers, which they stuck in their notebooks.

Partway through class she suddenly announced, “I forgot to collect those reports I assigned last week.  It’s a good thing I remembered; they are worth half your semester grades!”  The students she had enlisted to help her then brought up the papers she had given them and dutifully handed them in while the rest of the class sat with mouths agape.

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Teacher G pulled out a tray and told his kids he had brought them some homemade brownies.  When the excitement died a little, he started passing out some large letter Es he had cut out of brown construction paper.

He followed that a minute later by giving them some real brownies he had made.

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Teacher H told her class that she had been shopping for seeds for her vegetable garden and had run across some she just had to buy to share with her class.  She told them that botanists had developed a plant that would grow doughnuts the size of sunflowers.  She then handed out seed packets (she got the printable packets here – https://www.printables4mom.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/03/doughnuts.pdf ).  Each packet contained about a dozen Cheerios.

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Teacher I also put a little work into his prank.  First he bought toothpicks and bananas.  Then he would insert a toothpick into each banana and move the pick back and forth to slice the banana while it was still inside the peel. He repeated the process about every inch for the length of the ‘nana.

He then discarded the ‘picks and took the bananas to school with him, where he announced to his class that he was about to get rich.  He told the kids he had been working for years trying to breed a type of banana that grew pre-sliced.

Teacher I handed out the bananas and the students peeled them to find that they were, indeed, sliced inside the peel.

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This last one is another simple one, and may just be my favorite.  Teacher J announced to the class that he had used his own money to buy each and every student a brand new iPad, which they could keep.  As they were cheering their new favorite teacher, he opened a box of sterile eye pads he had bought for about $5, and started handing them out.

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I hope you liked these pranks.  I’m pretty sure Mr. Finley would have.  Heck, he probably would have used some of them…or all of them.

Just sayin’.

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