The DN

1   I swung from tree to tree yesterday.

2   I was a monkey man.

3   The second I got to school I had to arrange to say good-bye to my first class of the day. Swung them over to another tree and headed back to my hut. 

4   Thank God for bananas.

5   Things swirled. Before I knew it was lunch. I wrote some letters of recommendation last night during my insomnia, which is back in full force. 

6   Kids flew into my hut, gave thanks, and zipped to another tree.

7   After lunch I had arranged to go to another teacher's hut to take her class away from her. 

8  I never had a chance. Just as I moved to the door to my hut, a stampede of students flew at me. She had sent them over. This is what happens when schedules change four days into a new school year. Massive chaos. 

9   I was clearly in the middle of a Disney cartoon.

10  I didn't even have a hard copy of their names. I tried copying and pasting on my laptop, but it naturally decided to buffer incessantly the second they arrived. 

11  You don't always get good reception out in the middle of nowhere. 

12   I finally had to yank my laptop off my desk, unplug everything plugged into it and then dash to the front of the room. 

13  I panted for a bit, but the new students seemed pretty friendly. 

14  I decided to seat them alpha, instantly. It became five minutes of jungle noise and various toucan calls, but within seconds they sat ready to learn. 

15  "Howdy!" I mused. They said "Howdy!"

16  I tried filling them in on all the stuff we did last week, but that was a week ago. It occurred to me that they were a week behind, no matter how I examined it. 

17  I explained that we did some "get acquainted" activities and then dove into the entire MENSA exercise. 

18  They looked at me like I had ten heads. 

19   I finally blurted this: "Okay...look. I am a man. If Larry's son is my son's father, what relationship am I to Larry?"

20  <crickets>

21  That sort of quiet was right out of The Lion King.

22   Within seconds the jungle came alive.

23   They started shouting all sorts of things at me and coming up with all sorts of theories. I saw bright jungle colors everywhere, all quite Disney. 

24   One student finally became the king, at least for a second. "May I explain, Mr. Harrington?"

25  The guy did a better job of explaining the answer better than I've done over the past fifty years. 

26  

25   Uh...I haven't been teaching for the past fifty years?

26   The student was SO eloquent. The students, still spinning from the abrupt move from their sanctuary, couldn't fathom the answer he gave, and began demanding a better explanation. 

27  I smiled, walked over to a nearby desk, put my feet up and smiled. 

28  He tried re-wording it but couldn't get the others to quiet down long enough to make a case. 

29  He thought outside the box and created Larry's son's grandfather to augment the lesson he had already delivered.

30  To his credit, I can say that he stood right in the middle of all the noise. He asked if he could use stick figures to explain it. 

31  A comic cloud appeared over my head and my thoughts were this: "You should have left the grandpa out of it." Especially since he changed the grandfather's name from "grandfather" to "grandpa" due to crammed white board space. 

32  He was trying to parallel the relationships but fell further and further into the mire. Another student jumped up and helped him out. "Mind if I jump to the board, Mr. Harrington?"

33   <cloud above my head> "Why would I?"

34   The entire class was engaged, laughing, hooting and hollering as these students became the teachers, but the class was so engaged that answers echoed through the hills and laughter drowned out any hope of hearing the correct answer. SO Lion King. 

35  The new guy good-naturedly gave up, so I decided to move to the front and pick up the whiteboard pen. The class laughed and I laughed. We didn't even KNOW each other twenty minutes earlier and suddenly here we were. When it calmed down I explained it as a math challenge.

36  "This is really a math problem, if you think about it. Do you know what a least common denominator is in math?" Some said yes, some looked around like lost toucans, and others pretended not to hear, moved off rocks and into other areas of the hut. 

37  "Look. What is one million over two million?"

38  <crickets and a hoot owl> <more silence>

39   "So I am a man." I paused. At least I broke the silence. "Larry's son is my son's father. Who is my son's father, hopefully?"

40  "You!" they cried out instantly. "Okay. And can we safely put an equal sign in place of the word "is"?

41  They stared. 

42   I wrote "Larry's son = my son's father." 

43   Can we pare down "my son's father" to the word "me"?

44   I did it. It came out like this: "Larry's son = me."

45   Every light in the hut went on, and it became a classroom once again. 

46   Fun stuff, and we all successfully made it through all  the madness. 

47   Fun morning.

48   Last year I wouldn't have been able to deal with all of that. The buffering would have had me shaking my head and getting nervous. 

49  This year I have smiled each time I face tasks that would have seemed insurmountable a year ago. 

50  Felt good. Much of last year's nightmares are now miles away, perhaps even continents away. 

51  The entire day could have gone out of control at any moment. It didn't. At day's end I stared astonished at the empty room. I thought to myself, as I have each day of this interesting year, "What just happened?"

52  And that, my friends, is a bit of jungle mania. 

53  Hope you enjoyed it. I did. It's turning into a pretty interesting school year. 

54  Gottago. Hope you enjoyed this Disney nonsense. See you again.

55  Peace.

~H~

~H~