A Good Chalking To

Today I made a fool out of myself in front of all my kids. While attempting to start a lesson, I smeared chalk dust all over myself, most comically, all over the front of my pants.

It’s pretty safe to say that I’m a bit of a klutz. I drop things, like all mere mortals. My problem is that when I drop something, or something falls to the ground, I attempt to catch it stop it from falling. My goal is to be like Skellen Skarsgard’s character in Ronin. While I can make amazing grabs once in a while, most times, I end up making things worse.

That’s exactly what happened today in class. Lately, I’ve been teaching this lesson about a BBC poll which showed that most people around the world believe the Internet is a basic human right. It’s mostly a comprehension and listening exercise sprinkled with some other complex thinking. Well, as I was writing some of the answers on the blackboard, I dropped a fairly dirty chalk eraser. It bounced off the wall and as I tried to catch it wiped down the left side of my jacket and precisely in the middle of my crotch. I had this pink-white chalk stain strewn about my dark slacks.

Right before then, my co-teacher had gone out of the classroom to make some photocopies of my lesson, so I was pretty much solo.

So, as soon as I chalked myself, the kids broke into uncontrollable laughter. I tried covering it up, but it was no use. It was impossible to control while my teacher was out for a moment. So, for the next two minutes, I practically did a Charlie Chaplin-like stand up routine employing my terrible sense of physical comedy.

It lightened the mood for sure and showed a clumsier side of me to the students, but it was worth it. That’s because when we started the actual lesson, the listened and had input. I guess they realized I wasn’t as much of an ogre as they thought.