Disembowling with Children! Part 2

EXTERNAL ANATOMY OF THE CLAM

First off, these clams are huge. They weigh about the same as a softball, and are only slightly smaller. They are covered in a fine grit, which I later find to be the pulverized remains of the clams on the bottom of the bag- apparently they don’t do so well with UPS.

I’ve decided I’m going to acclimate the kids to the animals beforehand, as it’s likely to be the first time many of them have carved into a whole animal, save at the dinner table.

They smell. You know the smell. I’m passing them out to the third graders on those familiar trays, lined with that unknown rubbery substance. They are already in hysterics at how yucky they are, and frankly, so am I. I make a note on my hand in dry erase marker- the poor man’s blackberry- that says simply “trash.” I have to make sure there is a trash can available when we actually break these guys open, so that when, inevitably, one of the kids decides he needs to retch, it’ll be ready. I’m sincerely hoping that I don’t retch. You know how open to suggestion 8 year olds are.

And so the general freak-out continued, to the point where I had to call them out on bad behavior, something I am not wont to do, as I generally find it amusing. In fact, to illustrate this, I need to make an aside here, and talk about Australians.

I’ve never visited Australia. I’ve never seen a live Kangaroo, save at the zoo, or snorkled the Great Barrier Reef. I’ve never even received a postcard of the Opera House in Sydney, but I did spend a summer with Australians, and so I feel more qualified to comment than your average American, who equates the continent only with Foster beer ( which I’m told they consider to be piss in a can) and a few various sound bites from various public figures associated with crocodiles ( “That’s not a knife!”).

I learned some things about Australians that summer. I learned they call haemorrhoids “piles”, I learned how to properly throw a rugby bladder* (not a ball) correctly, and I learned that if you cup your hands into an ad hoc megaphone and shout “Aussie! Aussie! Aussie!” they are genetically compelled to respond with a fevered “Oy! Oy! Oy!” I also learned above all that despite their inclination to leave a trail of debris and carnage behind them while on vacation, they are a damn clever bunch.

Let us examine the ping-pong ball lab for proof. The idea was to test friction of different surfaces by rolling a ping-pong ball across them and timing them until they stopped. We visited several locations- the gym, the carpet in the music building, asphalt, waxed floor, etc. Apparantly this wasn’t exiting enough for the Australian kid, though, as by the end of the lab, when we were back in the classroom, he had constructed…well it’s hard to explain, really, unless you are familiar with Mousetrap. It was a game circa the late seventies, or at least it existed then, but may be older, in which you roll a marble down a a complex edifice of channels, slides, spirals and gizmos to the end result, which was to knock away the support beam of a little plastic cage, causing it to fall on your mouse. He had constructed such a mechanism, insomuch as he could with impromptu materials- the ping pong ball rolled down the edge of his desk, across the spine of one textbook, dropped onto the chair, rolled over to the floor and dislodged a pencil holding up a textbook, all carefully timed to squash an approaching spider. I know that in typical American education lore, my role was to flip out and chastise him for wanton behavior, but I just marveled at his ingenuity, and watched, fascinated. This is why I lack clear classroom management skills, but how could you not let such creativity flourish?

It is this same kid who is now holding the clam and alternately bring it closer and farther away from the face of a little girl going

“WhOOoooooooWhOOooooooWhOO”ooooooo!” – if this were an old Batman episode, there would be a spinning spiral as a backdrop, the type that is supposed to indicate vertigo. And it gives me vertigo, via flashback- I’m suddenly transported back to Ms. Mercuro’s 9th grade biology class.

I was not a great student. In fact I got D’s in both high school biology and chemistry, which may make call into question the qualifications of today’s educators, and that is reasonable. I wasn’t dumb, though; I just didn’t like the teacher. She was young and physically attractive, and it was her first year teaching at an all-boys Catholic High School in Detroit. Perhaps it was first-year teacher jitters on her part, but she started the first class by striding into the classroom and stating

“I know what you all are thinking, so CUT IT OUT.”

This did not endear us towards her.

She made similar blunders throughout the year. She gave Shelby a detention for chewing gum, even though he clearly was chewing on a pen cap hanging doggedly out of his mouth. She regaled us with tales of her sorority, noting how they gave a girl they didn’t like named Shannon the ever-so-droll nickname of “Shannon-head”, and tried to engage us in tales of her wild-and-willy party days when they used to bite wintergreen lifesavers in the dark and watch the sparks. Even at age 14, I was gaining a solid notion that some adults were freaking idiots. We couldn’t speak out much- this was a Catholic High School, and some of the priests were disciplinarians redolent of the glory days of the Inquisition, and so we took out our frustrations on her rather blameless rabbit by feeding it the erasers off the tops of our pencils. It acquired a taste for them, and the day she found it lying on the ground breathing in thin painful sheets because it had chewed off all the erasers off a box of pencils she kept in her back office, we could barely suppress our snickers. Did I mention that kids were cruel?

Perhaps her attitude was what made me act out during the fetal pig dissection. Sure, I learned about the internal anatomy of a piglet. I removed the intestines as instructed and placed them in the bag’o’ intestines set up on the lab table, I found the vas deferens, I poked around with the spleen and the liver and the heart, but the dissection lasted three days, and so I was getting hungry for some additional stimulation. To whit, the other useful tidbit of knowledge I gleaned from the dissection was that if you pressed the cold snout of a fetal pig to the back of the neck of one of your unsuspecting classmates, he will jump approximately 9 feet into the air and make a sound like a gazelle about to be impaled by a pack of lions. I should have stopped at one student, but this discovery was too precious to limit to only one test subject- this was science class after all, and to properly test a theory, you need a large data set. Soon enough, the whole class was desperately skittering around the classroom holding their fetal pigs like loaded sausages, trying to eek out the one kid who hadn’t cottoned on to where the intermittent strangled yelps were coming from. I received a detention for this, wherein I had to clean the tarantula cage with the tarantula notably still in it.

And so I’m watching the Australian kid attempting to ruffle this little girl, and she is indeed flipping out a little bit, but I am just watching distractedly, knowing full well I need to stop him. I imagine I’m experiencing parents must deal with all the time while they watch their own kid that is

a) clearly behaving out of bounds and
b) doing something they did as well, or similar, and find it extraordinarily amusing and clever.

You have to call the kid on it, but I always feel I’m being a bit false, lying almost. Who’d of thought being deceitful was a necessary skill in dealing with our most vulnerable citizens?

*Some of the first sports balls were essentially just an inflated pig’s bladder, which was then covered with leather in later years for shape retention. I find this fact remarkably apropos to the nature of this modest histoire.