April sample chapter of LMG 2

Hey everyone,

Hope you had a great weekend of pranking, watching college basketball, and NOT giving a present to the kid in my class whose birthday was on Saturday. He asked SO many teachers on Friday if they had gotten him a gift. Too bad, so sad.

Today I am posting a new rough draft chapter of Learn Me Gooder. As always, I love to hear feedback, good, bad, or ugly, so feel free to leave a comment in the, well, comments section.

Oh, and you still have until Monday evening to vote for Learn Me Good in the dailycheapreads.com March Madness Final Four!

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Date: Friday, May 14, 2010

To: Fred Bommerson

From: Jack Woodson

Subject: Milk. It’s what’s for dinner.

Hey bud,

We went on our field trip today! Four months ago, I never thought this day would get here, but we finally got to leave the school and travel. Our destination was The Science Place, which I’m sure you’re familiar with, a really cool center with lots of hands-on activities, visual aids, and graphic displays. Though it's not Chuck E. Cheese's, it IS a place "where a kid can be a kid."

After the bell rang this morning, we didn't stay long at the school. Mrs. Bird and I took the attendance, collected homework from last night, took care of the kids' water imbalances (move some out, move some in), and sent the students from our classes who were staying behind to various classrooms around the school. Lenny, Richard, Bobby, and Violette all lost out on their chance to go with us. Let it be known that No Child Left Behind does NOT apply to field trips.

We filled up three school buses for the journey to The Science Place. Actually, the REST of the third-grade packed into the first two buses, while Mrs. Bird and I rode in comfort and luxury with our classes in the third bus. Or, as close as one can possibly get to comfort and luxury inside a loud, stinky, graffitied school vehicle.

The Science Place is located southeast of Dallas in Fair Park, right next door to where the Texas State Fair is held annually. There is an enormous Ferris wheel in Fair Park, and when that wheel came into sight, I heard several kids gasp, "Oooh!! Six Flags!!" These are no doubt the same kids who shout, "Oooh!! Disney World!!" every time they see a duck.

Once we got there, we really had a lot of fun. There were simple machines to try out, sound and light experiments to play with, restrooms to use -- it was like Christmas in April.

Over in the Health and the Human Body area, there was a full-sized ambulance, with a "trauma patient" in the back. By the time I wandered over to that area, there were about 10 kids packed into every available space around the gurney, and they were all trying to get their hands on the fake heart-stimulator paddles. Clearly, some of these kids have been watching old episodes of ER or something, because they understand that before you can use these paddles, you have to yell, "CLEAR!" at the top of your lungs. What they DON'T seem to comprehend is the true function of those paddles. In their minds, the object is to strike the patient's chest as violently as possible with the paddles. How this could possibly aid the recovery of a human being, I don't understand. But then, I've never really understood the mass appeal of Hot Cheetos, either.

Lunch was nice and serene, out on the side lawn. After everyone had eaten, though, we found that we had a problem. When we had picked up our lunches from the cafeteria in the morning, we also took three coolers full of milk and juice cartons. The cafeteria ladies warned us not to bring back any of the milk or juice. Well, when lunch was over, one cooler was still filled to the brim, and the other two were more than half full. A-ha, I thought to myself. I have a mission.

When I asked my kids who wanted another milk or juice, I only got about eight takers. That wasn't even enough to put a dent in the amount of liquid we had left over. Next I told the kids that they would really be helping me out, doing me a personal favor, by drinking another milk or juice. Surprisingly, this actually got a lot of response. Pretty soon, the juice was gone and we were down to one cooler, but it was still nearly full, and the kids seemed to be getting lactose intolerant. When I discovered that there was a lot more CHOCOLATE milk hidden under a couple of layers of white milk, the kids got motivated again. I can't believe I have so many milksists at my school!

Nevertheless, I was soon standing over a cooler with about ten cartons of regular white milk in it. Timmy and Joanne had each consumed at least four cartons and were swaying on their feet like punch drunk prizefighters. Nobody else was stepping up to finish the job.

But then I got a brilliant idea. A super-fantastic, genius idea. I reached down into the cooler and pulled out the object I had spied. I held it up over my head and shouted, "Whoever drinks a carton of milk gets a free ice cube!"

The kids closest to the cooler almost got trampled.

All this time… All I needed was to offer ice cubes, and my kids would have bent over backwards to learn their lessons? Oh well, I’ll have to remember that for next year.

Talk to you later,

Ben Afflactose