Feast Or Famine, Thief Or Jammin'

Sweet Gummi Mary! If it’s not one thing it’s the opposite!

There is no happy medium this year. Just a disgruntled large. It is the Era of Extremes. Only last week, I had four students leave their textbooks behind in my class. My room was jam-packed with abandoned books. That’s a no-no, emphasized from the very first day, that results in loss of free points garnered by merely showing up with leanin’ material, doing what you’re supposed to do, and taking all your accouterments with you as you leave. Easy peasy, lemon squeezy.

But no. Apparently Mrs. Hillbilly Mom’s classroom is a locker shared by 110 pupils. Oh, and it’s also a wastebasket, kitchen cabinet, rec room, bedroom, ballroom, and news studio. But we’re not here to discuss the multifaceted identity of Mrs. HM’s classroom today. We’re here to talk about those books.

Do you know how much trouble an abandoned book is? First, it’s there on a desk in the way of another occupier. Second, you have to listen to a myriad of informants. “Hey! There’s a book. I found this book. It belongs to Fred. (Fred has not been around since 20011, try again.) What should I do with it? Here. Here’s a book I found.” Let the record show that Mrs. Hillbilly Mom does NOT want a found book plopped on her own desk. Because, well, WORK goes on at Mrs. HM’s desk, and an extra book is very much in the way.

So…the Great Book Identification Project gets underway. Records are checked to determine the borrower. Schedules are looked up to see what time would be most inconvenient to put in a call for the abandoner to return for his orphan. Lunch time is always a good reminder. Nobody really wants to get up from a delicious tray of cafeteria food and cease cuttin’ up with one’s peers just to traipse down the hall to be saddled with a textbook for the rest of the festive feeding session.

But remember, this is the Era of Extremes. A mere two days after the massive book dump, Mrs. HM returned to her classroom from lunch to find and interloper. Oh, she didn’t have a label that proclaimed INTERLOPER. No. She was walking down the hall, all innocent and stuff, carrying one of Mrs. HM’s textbooks under her arm, oblivious to the fact that her close proximity to Mrs. HM’s door, and the light in that room that was now ON, when it is normally OFF once there is no motion in the room for ten minutes, had marked her as an interloper. Problem is, she’s not even in any of Mrs. HM’s classes!

“Hey! What are you doing with my book? Why were you in my room?”

“Oh. I was just getting this book for Trixie. She told me to. She said she sits in the corner. So I got this book off the table in the back. It’s hers, isn’t it? It was the only one I could find.”

“Let me see the number. No. That is NOT Trixie’s book. Give it to me. Now I have to carry it back to where you got it. Don’t go in my room if you don’t have my class and don’t have permission.”

“Can I look for Trixie’s book?”

“You can look at her desk, right there in the front, nowhere near the back table. See? Nothing on or in Trixie’s desk. She must have been mistaken.”

So I took that book and stashed it in the cabinet, so nobody else could grab it, what with this being the era of extremes, and kids now wanting EXTRA textbooks, rather than leaving them behind. I knew this was not Trixie’s book without looking it up. No, Mrs. HM does not have every student’s book number memorized. She’s not THAT good. But close. The books are given out in numerical order, so I knew that book number 11-02 could not have been assigned to Trixie’s class. I also knew that a student just moved, and the office worker brought me his book. Which she plopped right on my desk, necessitating relocation to the back table during class, what with Mrs. HM not all that keen on opening up the cabinet and bending over to put a book on the bottom shelf while her own bottom would be on display to the class.

And wouldn’t you know it, the very next hour, a kid came waving a book under Mrs. Hillbilly Mom’s nose. “I found this book. What should I do with this book. It was in my desk. Do you know whose it is? Where should I put it? It’s a library book. The librarian will want it. We can’t leave it in the desk. Somebody might take it.” Little did he know.

My desks are arranged with the opening facing the front of the room. So kids can’t hide their hands clutching cell phones and text all the livelong class period. So very few of them ever stash their stuff in the desks, not wanting to lean over and fumble around putting books in and taking books out. Most things that end up there are because the front person was turned around against the rules, and put their stuff in the wrong desk.

I was not about to look up Trixie and call for her to come get her book.

“That’s a library book. Take it to the librarian. She can figure out who it belongs to.”

There’s more that one way to skin a book.