Just a place to jot stuff down. Whatever. Fuck off.
A quick letter to the teachers out there:
There are jokes. There are even funny jokes floating around the ether and air, passing from ear to grey matter to ear to mouth to ear. Some of them are knee slappers. Some of them are so funny that you’ll literally scrape the skin from your bones due to the rampant slapping.
But there comes a point where you’re to realize that a joke, no matter how funny it may be, is inappropriate, especially when you’re dealing with someone as developmentally sensitive as a class of fourth graders.
I suppose it’s too late for this, but the example I’m going to use was in my fourth grade class. I had a wonderful teacher, Ms. Nicholson. She let us play with POGS, the little cardboard discs with pictures of Alf and Homer Simpson on them, even though most other teachers wouldn’t. She gave out candy for doing well on tests. She was quick to punish, although she managed to hand out her wrath to only those who deserved it and in such a manner that they always took it on the chin without a fight.
One day, in the early days before the internet was something widely used by teachers, she heard a joke in what I could only assume was the teachers lounge. Having been the last person to receive the joke, she had no one else to share it with. Not even her husband. It was of such urgency that she pass this on that she could not wait to get home, instead, she had to impart it to her students.
And she phrased the joke exactly as she herself had heard it.
“So, my cousin Phil lives in a big house. And one day, there’s a knock on the door.”
The fourth graders are all curious as to this story. It is not prefaced as a joke, rather, an event in Ms. Nicholson’s life.
“He goes to answer the door, and who should be standing behind, but a woman with a telegram!”
At this point, she has to stop. We don’t really know what a telegram is. I, of course, did, but that’s just because I was developmentally leaps and bounds ahead of the other knuckle draggers in my class... Despite the fact that I was having trouble grappling with the infernal concept of ‘remainders’.
“A telegram,” she continued, “Is an old way to send a message.”
None of us thought to question why Phil would receive a telegram rather than a phone call. We were accepting this at face value. Even me.
“A person would come to your house some times and read it out loud to you.”
We accepted this as a cultural tidbit that we had been in the dark about.
“Well, sometimes, if you paid the right people, the telegram would be a singing telegram. And Phil, oh boy, did he think it was a singing telegram.
“ ‘A singing telegram!’ and the lady said, ‘No, not a singing telegram’.
“But Phil wouldn’t have it. He was so excited. He’d wanted one of these since he was a little kid. ‘A singing telegram!’ ‘No sir, not quite’. But Phil wouldn’t let it go.
“ ‘But oh, boy, a singing telegram!
“And the lady had finally had enough. ‘Sure,’ she said. ‘A singing telegram.
“ ‘Your sister Jo is dead/
“ ‘ She put a bullet in her head.’”
And Ms. Nicholson waited for the laughs.
We were, as it was not prefaced as a joke, nor was it particularly funny, aghast. This was her cousin, who was now dead, from a self inflicted wound. Ms. Nicholson was beaming, beaming at us. Several of the students, crying, went to give her a hug. Some wept quietly for her loss in her seat. At least one uttered the word, “Bitch,” in regard to the fictitious telegram lady.
And I just sat back, bewildered, at why she would think that it would be a good or appropriate story to tell about how her cousin killed herself.
