It's Common Courtesy, Really

Hear ye, hear ye! The end is nigh! The line for the handbaskets forms HERE.

I fear it my be too late to save everybody once I get my proposed handbasket factory up and running. Every day, another sign rears its ugly head falls off the wall. Let me illustrate the sad state of Newmentia, Hillmomba, The World.

We are required to post emergency procedures in our classrooms. Some wizard took the 11 x 17 signs and laminated them. All shiny and pretty as long as they stay on the wall. I have spent around $301.59 on those clear square sticky things to hold up my posters. They stay for a while. Then they start feeling their oats, or the draft from the air conditioner and its best friend gravity, and fling themselves off the wall with abandon like an Acapulco cliff diver. The Pony and I slap them back up in the morning. Sometimes they stay for weeks. Sometimes not.

Today my class was taking their benchmark test for first quarter when one of the safety procedure posters sprang off the white-painted concrete-block wall. In all my years of teaching, whenever something like that happens, a kid gets up and picks up the item and brings it to me, or tries to put it back, or asks what he should do with it. Without fail. Kids are little do-gooders at heart.

Until now.

That poster fell to the floor, and the whole front row and part of the second turned to look at me. Seriously. A look that I construed as, "Woman, you need to get up here and pick this up off the floor!" Yeah. That was the tone of their ogling. I found it a bit shocking. The entitlement. The too-good-to-help-out-old-Mrs.-Hillbilly-Mom-ness of it all. AND, a few weeks back, a kid dropped her pencil as I walked across the front of the room passing out papers, and looked at me like I should pick it up! Which I did. Because Mrs. Hillbilly Mom's mom raised her right. BUT that's not all! Sweet Alabama Beige, one of our mathies, reported that yesterday a kid called her over to ask a questions, then said, "Will you pick up my pencil for me?" THAT was his question!

SWEET GUMMI MARY!

This is truly the end of civilization as we know it. I don't expect kids to wait on me hand and foot. I have no objection to picking up my own poster when it falls off the wall. But when they are sitting right there within two feet of it, and it's on the floor right inside the door, like a welcome mat foretelling tornado doom, and I am in the opposite corner of the room, grading tests...you'd think a person could make a rational decision.

I took my own sweet time. After all, that poster wasn't going anywhere. I was in the middle of something. I certainly did not want to present my backside to the help-less. So when it was almost time for the bell, I set aside my test stack and went to prop open the door with my illicit doorstop. That way I could point my behind out into the hall while prying that poster, which of course fell sticky side down, from the tile, where it gripped like a toddler on his mother's skirt on the first day of preschool.

Farmer H needs to find me some concrete contractors to get this proposed handbasket factory off the ground.