I triple dog dare you to guest post

Today's Guest Poster is a fellow Dallas ISD teacher who blogs under the name AND at the site 100 Farmers. Farmers writes a very "A Christmas Story" themed story about kids and their BB gun injuries after Winter Break.

Her story is titled, "Have a good holiday and don't shoot your eye out."

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On the first day back from Christmas Break, not one, not two but three students showed up with bb-gun injuries. One had pellets still in his chin. Now, you would think that with as many showings of a Christmas Story that everyone must have seen by now, that my students would know that “BB-Guns can shoot your eyes out.” Asking about the injuries, the class started sharing various stories of their injuries from bb-guns.

Just out of curiosity, I started taking polls of my classes and came up with some startling statistics. Out of 176 students, roughly 95 % had been shot with a bb-gun and about 90% had shot someone with one. The number one target seemed to be brothers. The largest target seemed to be their brothers’ keisters.

I can pretend to be appalled by such numbers but I must confess to a certain incident involving my sister’s keister and my brother’s bb-gun. To this day, I can’t tell you why I did it but I do remember that her keister just seemed really annoying at that moment. The funny thing is that my brother confessed to the crime out of pure nervousness after the initial screaming from both my sister and parents. I never got in trouble for it. I shouldn’t be laughing at that but paybacks are hard Brother dear.

Anyway, listening to my kid’s stories, I am always so appalled by the near misses, catastrophes, and sure stupid things that my kids do during vacations. It’s almost like the “stupid”, “hey ya’ll, watch this” quotient is ratcheted up by the word “holiday”. When I ask the kids what happened, it usually boils down to playing around and boredom. Not that I’m advocating 365 days of school (oh god, no), but I do worry less about them walking down the hallway than hanging out with bored friends playing Xbox.

When I send them out the door I send them with a prayer for safe travel or wishes for peace in a troubled family. At this point, I’m guessing my prayers need to be extended to either “please don’t target your brother’s keister with your bb-gun”, or “please be so busy that you come back safe to me.”
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My thanks to another great Guest Poster, and my invitation to everyone to check out her blog at 100 Farmers right away!!