Where's Encyclopedia Brown When You Need Him?

Kids amaze me.

I covered the front window in my classroom with black paper yesterday morning. That's because I'm treating my freshmen to a 2011 Mrs. Hillbilly Mom's Classroom Premiere of Dante's Peak. They just finished a chapter on volcanoes, so we are not stressing during this parent conference week, but instead are wallowing in the fruits of our labors and applying our new-found knowledge to real-life incidents. Or at least fictional real-life incidents.

The Truth in Blogging Law requires that I clarify: I, myself, did not cover the window. It was the work of two students. I think one was pulling my leg. Figuratively, of course. We can't have students pulling teacher's legs willy-nilly here in the land of Missouri public school education. Remember, we're the teachers not trustworthy enough to text kids for educational purposes? Anyhoo...dude kept applying the masking tape to the black paper and black window frame in a wasteful manner. Instead of longways, Dude applied the tape across. So the border, instead of being streamlined stripes, turned out to look like a bunch of stitches. I said their window treatment made it look like Frankenstein's Window. The window-treaters proclaimed that theirs would set a new trend. Yeah. Right.

The next class was fine. Because they never notice anything. It is quite probable that I could walk in from the hall with my hair on fire, and someone would ask, "What time to we get out of here?"

The class after that must understand that short of giving everybody polarized sunglasses, a blacked-out window is the next best way to combat scattered light that makes your projector image wash out. I fielded nary a question.

Oh, but the one after that was all abuzz. "What happened to your window?" At least seven different students asked me that. They were just begging for a Mrs. Hillbilly Mom lecture.

"I don't know what all the fuss is about. You act as if my window has totally disintegrated/fallen out/been stolen/been broken out with marbles fired from a tiny slingshot crossbow. AND THEN covered with black paper. Because black paper will stand in for tempered glass just fine. I'm a regular pioneer, making windows out of greased paper. Not really. I'm being facetious. I'm not old enough to remember paper windows. Let's move on to our movie now."

Could they not calculate:
MOVIE + SUNLIGHT = PALE IMAGE

And then formulate:
BLACK PAPER + WINDOW = NO SUNLIGHT DIMMING THE MOVIE

Today's youth need cheats for surviving in the real world.