When You're Hot, You're Hot

I have just returned home from a hard day of casting steel ingots down at the mill...umm, stoking the coal-burning engine of my locomotive...umm, field-testing flame-retardant suits for firefighters...umm. clearing 10 acres of rain forest with a dull machete...umm, pouring an asphalt roadway in the Mojave Desert...I mean, teaching conceptual physics to a whole passel of 9th graders. Did I mention it was in a climate-controlled environment? I think I am dehydrated. I'm surprised I didn't leave a snail-like trail of underboob sweat everywhere I went. The trickling rivulets of scalp sweat were maddening. Mrs. Hillbilly Mom is not designed to operate efficiently at extreme temperatures.

Add to that the recent suggestion that we all run laps around the room during instruction, to keep the kids interested, and discourage malcontent behavior, and you have a heat stroke waiting to happen. Oh, and might I disclose that the principal paid me a visit 1st hour, three minutes after the tardy bell, 33 minutes after I reported to the parking lot for duty. Thank the Gummi Mary, Mrs. Hillbilly Mom has learned to prepare her classroom the night before morning duty. She had the objectives on the board, papers (in alphabetical order) ready to pass back and go over, make-up quizzes ready for flunkies, worksheets ready for today's lesson, the right buzz words on her tongue to refresh the memory of yesterday's lesson, attendance and lunch count already logged into the computer, and the kids in their seats silently working on the bellringer. Let it be noted that the day always goes downhill after the shining utopia that is 1st hour.

With the temperature already at 75 inside, I left off the projector/ not-very-SmartBoard combo, except to plug in briefly to check out the nuclear reactor Big Bang trial thingy. Let it also be noted that Mrs. Hillbilly Mom did not Google 'big bang', but instead went to Google News and chose a boring sciency-sounding site. We opened the windows, listened to the groundskeeper mowing under those life-saving portals, and pitied the folks on the other side of the hall, who garner morning sunlight, and can't open their windows unless they want a giant economy size whiff of sewer gas. A visitor or intruder would have seen, upon glancing through the small, rectangular, classroom-door windows, a sight that would have done Salvador Dali proud: teachers and students draped over desks, languishing bonelessly, listless and limp.

When you're hot, you're hot.