Tuesday, November 27, 2007

Jon’s Report Card circa… A Long Time Ago

I found an old report card from elementary school. And JUST FOR YOU I spent all afternoon transcribing Mrs. Eggelston’s old-school-marm-script comments from the margins. I aim to please.

— Jon is reading well, but his fascination with mucus and, please forgive the term, “mondo-boogers” [his term] has gotten out of hand. Please ask him not to touch the other children’s nostrils.

— He needs to stop playing the blues harmonica during recess for tips. He is not a 1920s black sharecropper.

— His Math skills are formidable, but I’m worried that he is spending far too much time trying to “telnet” into First National Bank from the Library’s computer.

— While we strive to be as tolerant as possible, we do not understand why he occasionally dresses as a “ninja-pirate-warrior-prince.” He’s very creative with his costumes, but we have a hard time understanding his “pirate talk.” And when he goes into “ninja-stealth-death-mode” and creeps against the wall; he makes the entire class pretend they can’t see him. This is very distracting to the learning environment and I’ve had to warn him about this conduct.

— I’m thrilled with his interest in Civics, but he must stop burning Richard Nixon in effigy. It’s against the fire code to have an open flame in the classroom. Although he does know quite a bit about the Watergate scandal and seems to be able talk forever about President Ford’s pardon of Nixon. Does he watch a lot of news shows?

— His vocabulary is impressive, but what he has suggested in numerous essays is both anatomically impossible and seems like it would be quite painful. Is someone in your family currently a sailor or used to be in the Navy?

— It’s true that February is Black History Month and we should be more sensitive as a culture, but we have to refer to the children by “their slave names” (Jon, Mary, Billy, etc.); it’s very confusing to call him “Shabazz X” just for one month.

— During the Biology section he became physically disturbed during the frog and worm dissections. After grabbing as many samples as he could hold in his little hands, he ran out of the classroom, screaming “You may NOT hurt my pretties! Stay away from them, you visigoths!”

I am very happy to have in in the classroom as he is certainly a lively little fellow. We will have to work on some of these more “disturbing” behaviors as the year progresses.

Thank you.
Linda Egglston

1. You had me at ‘blues harmonica.’ Hilarious.

   Posted by Novembrance  on  11/28/07  at  09:33 AM

2. it seems you got your geek on early :)

   Posted by witchypoo  on  11/28/07  at  03:38 PM

3. So… when the mondo-boogers got out of hand… are we talking about a flicking problem?

   Posted by Radioactive Jam  on  11/29/07  at  05:22 AM

4. Oh, jeez, I think I peed a little… Is it bad that a couple of those hit close to home? :D Great!

   Posted by Jim  on  11/29/07  at  11:47 AM

5. This is really funny. I used to have a talkative coworker who annoyed an annoying supervisor a LOT by trying to figure out where he had met her before being hired there.  He had a thick southern accent and after weeks of fruitless “Did you used to shop at the grocery store on the corner of 82nd and” kind of stuff he asked her “was you ever in the NAVY?” and then steam came out her ears and she exploded.  So: was that you?

   Posted by moe  on  12/01/07  at  10:37 AM

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