Back to Normal

The Royal visit is over. My body is adjusting to waking up at obscenely early hour. In short: it is back to normal.

Today Tagore brought me a birthday present: a box of chocolates with a red bow. "That's sweet," I thought. "Thanks, Tagore!"

"Somebody gave them to me and I don't want 'em!" he told me.

"Oh!" I commented. I was thinking the same thing myself: I will give them to Thun and Jason.

"You want to know the ingredients?" he was reading, "sugar, sucrose, fructose, monosodium glutamate, autolyzed yeast, hydrolyzed corn gluten, . . . "

"Tagore, STOP!" I yelled, "I'm gonna give them to my CHILDREN!"

Later, as I was about to pack them, I thought, "no, an invitation to obesity and pancreatic cancer--I will leave them out for other teachers in the L-shaped room."

In the Year 11 class, I busted Hawoon for inappropriate use. He was listening to his earphones. Admittedly, I was lecturing about Platonic Solids or the history of Koenigsberg, or something really boring, but he knows there's a "no earphones" rule in our classroom.

"Sorry" he confessed, "I am falling behind in my course."

"WHAT??" I demanded the earphones and put them to my ear, expecting to hear gangsta rap, or April Lavigne, or, if I was lucky, maybe Bob Marley. But, no, instead I heard a somber American accent stating:

"Unit 4 . . . Techniques of Integration . . . Section 3 . . . Recursion formulas involving tangents and secants . . . "

My class was so boring that he was listening to Calculus lectures to relieve the boredom!